My Winter blues P.O.A. (Plan of Action)

We rarely get sick, my six year old son has never been on antibiotics and my fourteen year old daughter hasn’t been on antibiotics since we stopped seeing it as an option for treating respiratory dis-eases.  Antibiotics are useless against viruses so all that you would be doing by giving your kids antibiotics for the common cold is depressing their already straining immune system.

Studies have shown that taking antibiotics may actually permanently reduce your immune system's ability to fight viruses. It’s making the problem worse! Overuse of antibiotics by misinformed adults is producing strains of super bugs, or bacteria, that we just can’t control. But I know, when that little person starts throwing a fever, and just lies there like a rag, it’s terrifying and it’s our responsibility to keep them safe and healthy.

So, what do I do if I see a cold coming on?

-Firstly it’s really crucial to stop it early. Just one morning can make all the difference, it’s much more complicated to cure a sick kid than to help a kid whose immune system is telling you it needs time out (to go pick tomatoes!) from getting sick. It’s kind of like gardening, if the plant is strong, pests stay away from it, if the plant isn’t happy, pests take it out!

-Take away all mucus forming foods (gluten, dairy, sugar)

- Up the raw foods, especially sprouts

-Juice (apple, carrot, pepper, beetroot, ginger, mint, whole lemon)

- Feed them as much of Papa’s special tea as they will tolerate:

Ginger (grated, as much as they can take)

Honey (3 spoons)

Lemon juice (half)

Apple cider vinegar (table spoon)

It tastes as bad as it sounds but if you put loads of honey, it’s actually quite yum.

-Echinacea

-The right homeopathic remedy for them every half hour.

-I watch them and give them different homeopathics as their symptoms change. I really recommend homeopathics for kids, and going on a home homeopathics course is the best thing you can do for your family’s health. Children respond so well to them.    

-Plenty rest

I know that this is a very controversial thing to say, but children can handle 40 degrees. It’s very stressful, but since bugs only die around that temperature, it really just prolongs their illness by giving them meds suppress temperature.

When my husband and I had our first anniversary we decided to have a home cooked romantic dinner together as our two year old baby boy was a little sick and we didn’t want to leave him. Half way through the meal, we heard crazy sounds and he had gone into fever convulsions and stopped breathing! Terrifying! We rushed to the clinic and the doctor said he was fine and with some cortisone and antibiotics would be over it in a week. My husband politely declined the cortisone, took the prescription for the antibiotics, and we left.

We went to our homeopath/GP the next day and learnt that the fever convulsions don’t come from high fever but from fever that rises too fast. He went from normal to 39.9 in half an hour, that’s what did it. Fever is the body’s strongest artillery against illness so we decided to let the fever rise slowly, so that the body itself wouldn't go into shock. The next week we didn’t sleep much, we wrapped cloth soaked in vinegar water (best traditional method I’ve ever found for fever) around his feet once the fever had started and had him on a humidifier a couple times a day. We woke up hourly throughout the night to check his fever and gave him children’s paracetomal suppositories half an hour after he’d hit 40 degrees. After about 5 days he was better. A few young children that I know got that bug that year, they all ended up in the clinic with convulsions. It was so scary.

 The reason for this story? We didn’t take the big Pharma route, we chose to do it our way, even though we were scared and sometimes unsure, and our son has never gotten anywhere near that sick again. Every winter we watch as all the kids in the class play illness ping pong and sometimes half the class is absent, but there is Luka, usually barefoot and healthy. He sometimes gets the sniffles, but nothing one day at home can't fix.

The route we took isn’t for the faint hearted, and I do believe that antibiotics have their place, we had a very good infrastructure of professional therapists and doctors to turn to and that made all the difference. We learnt a lot that winter! The secret is to be in touch with your kids, if they start getting sick, don’t wait, do something straight away. I’d love to hear your family healing secrets as I’m always on the lookout for home remedies.