A Proven Method to Cure a Cold – Make Yourself Sneeze

Many people are getting cold these days. So, let’s talk about this again.

Cold is generally caused by wind cold (A terminology of Traditional Chinese Medicine) entering our body. It has two stages. At the first stage, symptoms are likely sneezing, chills, running nose with clear mucus, etc; The 2^nd stage symptoms may include sore throat, fever, headache, deep cough with dense mucus, etc. The 1^st stage usually last only a few hours to a day. At this stage, the cold stays at our body surface and it’s easy to repel.

When we get a cold, most of us will first grab some medicines like Tylenol, Motrin, Advil, etc and hope they’ll be effective before going to see a doctor and take antibiotics. However, most of these medicines are designed to stop you from sneezing. In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), sneezing is a natural reaction of our body trying to repel the wind cold with the heat generated during the sneezing process.  Therefore, why not sneeze more? This is the reason behind our method today – Make yourself sneeze.

Method:

Take a small piece of napkin paper (about 2 inches x 2 inches). Roll it between your hands until it has a definite tip at end. Lightly insert it into one of your nasal cavities and probe around. Soon you’ll feel a tickling sensation and a sneeze coming on. If it doesn’t work immediately or you feel the paper is losing its strength because of the dampness, use a new piece of paper. Repeat until you cannot sneeze any more no matter how hard you try. You may end up sneezing 10 to 30 times depending on how much wind cold is in your body. After that you’ll feel your body warmed up and comfortable because a lot of the cold has been repelled out of your body.

This method is very effective for Stage One symptoms. I.e., if you have sneezing, chills, running nose with clear mucus, you maybe find the cold is gone after practicing this only one time. After the sneezing, if you can drink of cup of warm ginger tea, it’ll help you get better faster. Remember, the Stage One only last a few hours to half day or so, do this as soon as you feel the cold symptoms.

It’s the 2^nd stage cold that gives us the most trouble. Our purpose is to prevent it from happening. But after it happens, is the “sneezing” method still helpful? The answer is yes, but we have to combine it with other treatments like herbal tea, acupuncture, scrapes, cupping, etc.  An acupuncturist will be able to help you figure out the right treatments for you. See my earlier blog for some good herbal teas - “How to Stay Healthy During Cold Season” published on December 6, 2010.

Other Benefits: Allergies, sinus infection, constipation. Allergies have been caused by build-up of coldness in our body over time. Sneezing generates heat in your body. That’s why sneezing can help alleviate allergies. So, when you have allergies, try sneeze more instead of less. I personally have family related sinus infection. Each time it comes back, I do two things to drive it away quickly and easily. First, I apply mashed garlic to the bottom of my feet (to channel the toxic heat down); Secondly, I keep myself sneezing. I tried so many different things and there is no other ways that’s more helpful than this. We’ll talk about garlic more in a future blog; Why is it helpful for constipation? That because our large intestine is interconnected with our lung. Sneezing can help the lung to help the large intestine to move and alleviate constipation. Some men reported that this sneezing practice accidently solved their pre-ejaculation problem. How is that related? That’s too complicated to explain in this short blog.

Disclaimer: This idea was not made up by me or some folk doctors. It’s originally described 2,500 years ago in <The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine>. The only difference is that it used a kind of soft grass instead of napkin paper.

When I’m writing this blog, I cannot help having a strong feeling of gratitude toward our older generations for passing such natural and healthy knowledge to us. My whole family, including my 15-year old daughter and 8-year old son, haven’t needed to take medicine for years (except for natural herbs). With this gratitude, I feel the obligation to share this with others.

Trisha Han

Mother Nature's Acupuncture of Austin