Natural remedies for your health

My poor little (well, not so little anymore but she’s still my baby) daughter is sick. Not too serious; just a little cold. So besides the usual cold remedies like ginger tea (just boiled ginger with honey), Vitamin C (about 4000mg to 5000mg a day), Echinacea, Zinc, and lots of soups, I adjusted her spine (remember I am a Chiropractor?) and I’ll probably acupuncture her if need be. If there is a natural method to improve her immune system, I will try them all. After all, I’m all about letting nature take its course, like letting our bodies heal itself with a little help of natural remedies.

So, having a sick child at home made me wonder if there are some quirky natural remedies that I haven’t thought of that will help improve our health. We all know about the healing properties of Echinacea, Omega 3 Fatty Acid, Avocado, and ginger and alike but did you know about these below?

1. Oolong Tea for Eczema – Polyphenols in tea appear to help those people with mild eczema (My kids can use this. They’ll be caffeinated but eczema free.)
2. Peppermint Oil, tiger balm, or white flower oil – menthol in these oils has analgesic properties that help tension headaches (I knew about tiger balm but didn’t know about other oils. Just a caution – these will smell so I wouldn’t go on a date after using these oil. But then again, if going on a date is causing the tension headache, may be you should rethink about the date)
3. Horse Chestnut – an herbal extract that helps varicose veins by strengthening veins and reducing inflammation (stocking up for later years)
4. Rosemary – sniff some rosemary aroma for mental alertness and improving memory (Can I attach this to a gas mask and sniff this all day?)
5. Bilberry – taking 25mg to 50 mg of bilberry extract improve night vision (stocking them right next to Horse Chestnut Extracts)
6. Tea Tree Oil – antiseptic property of tea tree oil is great for athlete’s foot. Coat your feet three times a day for a couple of week and continue for a week or two after symptoms disappear (Just in case my two athletes contract this from locker rooms)
7. Cayenne pepper – to warm up cold feet, sprinkle a bit of cayenne pepper inside  your socks. This folk remedy may help circulation and improve blood flow (If this doesn’t work directly on my feet, may be putting them in food will warm them up)
8. Duct tape – clears up wart. That’s right. Duck tape an area where a wart is for a week and it will be gone. Apparently, irritating the skin with duct tape triggers the immune reaction to fight the infection (One roll can clear up a whole lot of warts!)
9. Honey – there’s a reason why we put honey in our teas for coughs and why cough syrups are so sweet. And supposedly, honey is more effective for coughs than cough syrups because it’s the sweetness that helps the coughs and not the medicine in the cough syrup (and honey tastes so much better than cough syrups!)
10. GLA – if you ruled out other cause of hair loss, such as stress, overuse of hair care products, and certain medications, try supplementing with evening primrose oil. It is loaded with gamma-linolenic acid (GLA), an essential fatty acid that is responsible for hair growth and is hard to get from your diet. You may need to take 500mg twice a day for eight weeks before seeing results. (Being that I shed more than my dog does, I am definitely trying this.)

I hope you learned a thing or two from this list. I certainly did.

What do you do to help improve your health naturally?