If you or a loved one are prone to colds and flu and respiratory allergies, a really useful concept to get a grasp on is the way the Chinese look at contagious respiratory illnesses. It is really much more complicated than what I am about to tell you - entire books have been written on "external pathogenic invasions" but in a nutshell:
There are two temperatures of pathogens (viruses, bacteria, pollen, extremes of temperature, etc) that invade the respiratory tract: hot and cold. TCM calls these pathogens Wind Heat or Wind Cold, as they seem to enter "on the wind".
When someone first contracts a wind cold, the pathogen causes any combination of the following: a headache in the back of your head/neck, sneezing, a CLEAR runny nose, a cough with thin, watery mucus, body aches, simultaneous fever and chills with CHILLS more predominant, and NO sweating.
If you have a sore throat, it is mild.
In contrast, wind heat pathogens cause feverish feelings or true fever, sweating, sore, dry or scratchy throat, headache (usually frontal) thirst, cough with thick or sticky yellow mucus, and thick and yellow or green nasal discharge.
Lots of people pop Echinacea at the first sign of a cold or flu, and sometimes it works, yet other times it doesn't. Why does it work sometimes and not others? Because Echinacea is a cooling herb. So which type of pathogen do you think it would effectively treat? That's right, a wind heat invasion. It cools down a wind heat invasion and makes it more difficult for the pathogen to multiply. If you take Echinacea when you have a wind cold, not only will it not help, but it could make your illness worse.
Use Echinacea only for signs of wind heat.
For a wind-cold, cut about 2 inches of raw ginger into medallions about as thick as a quarter and put them into a quart of water. Boil and steep for 20 minutes. Pour this ginger water into a tub of hot water and get yourself into the tub. Soak until you work up a good sweat, and then soak some more. ( You can even bundle up really warm and make yourself continue to sweat in bed, too if you can stand it. ) Ginger is very warm, so its good for wind cold invasions. Wind colds tend to slam the pores shut, so you don't sweat, and you are therefore unable to "sweat it out." Ginger effectively remedies this problem.
So next time you feel that familiar scratchy throat, or those body aches, pay specific attention to those symptoms, and treat accordingly.
And in case you don't know it, acupuncture can also help your body get rid of the bug. Acupuncture and herbs was the only form of medicine in China for thousands of years, so they had plenty of time to figure that one out!
That is it for now. Tomorrow is another day. Enter it well.
