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| Steamed orange with salt - a natural remedy touted for coughs. |
I don't know why I started coughing a week back.
But I also heard some of my friends have been having lingering coughs too. Weather? Maybe. It has been raining at night but blisteringly warm in the day. Change of temperature perhaps.
I have horrid experiences with coughing and it goes way back to my childhood days. Weak lungs maybe. Cold gets to me so I don't even wear bare back tops because my lungs might catch a cold! So travelling to cold countries is a bit of a love-hate relationship for me. I like that I don't sweat but I also know too much of cold and I get all wonky inside.
So yeah. From my past experience I only either get Wind Heat cough or Wind Cold cough. Both are terrible.
Both are hacking, phlegmy and wrecks sleep especially at night.
For the past week I have tried a lot of remedies.
From drinking water steeped with Indian borage (plucked fresh from my garden) to eating royal jelly, I tried them all.
Initially the cough wasn't so bad.
But the past few days I was majorly annoyed. I was coughing at night and made me lose sleep. Had to wake up in the middle of the night to drink some hot water to soothe my itchy and dry throat.
It sucks when you don't get a full night's sleep. (I treasure my 8 hours. Since young I have always loved sleeping. If I don't get to bed by midnight I can get all heaty the next day and be grouchy.)
Finally Nic told me to grab Woods peppermint cough syrup from the Chinese medical hall.
As an aside I noted that Woods now comes in 50ml and 100ml plastic bottles. When I was a kid, it came in larger glass bottles! How times have evolved.
Anyway I was taking 10ml of the pepperminty cough medicine 4 times a day. Seriously it did help. It loosens phlegm and disgusting as it is, we need to spit it out. So there I was running to the bathroom sink every few minutes to expel the loosened mucous.
I also noticed that cold makes my cough worse - being in an air cond room for instance threw me into a coughing fit. I would tear up and turn red with all that sputtering. At some point I'd sneeze too.
My cough was worse in the middle of the night and upon waking up.
I actually finished one 100ml bottle of Woods peppermint cure in 2.5 days.
While waiting to go and buy another bottle, I recalled a cough remedy using orange.
You see, I made a silly mistake last night.
I sliced some oranges for Nic after dinner and thought since it is full of vitamin C I should also have some to boost my immunity.
Bad idea.
If you are coughing, avoid oranges like the plague. You will cough much worse and I experienced that last night. I was coughing like crazy! My throat was dry and itchy.
The other type of food to avoid are deep-fried or spicy food. That I was diligently avoiding.
So today I decided to dig up that remedy that I heard so much about. If fresh orange killed me, the opposite of that is steamed orange with salt which I believe will cure my cough.
I don't know why a steamed orange works the opposite way but changing the properties of natural food could change its effects.
It's quite easy. Just soak an orange in water for a while (just in case there are pesticides). Next slice about a third off the top. Using a fork, pierce the orange flesh while sprinkling some salt over. Caution: don't overdo the salt. Half a teaspoon is good.
Cover the orange with its top. Place orange in a bowl. Put bowl into steamer or wok. Cover and steam over medium high heat for 15 minutes. Turn off fire - let the orange cool a little before you eat up the softened pulp. The orange "sweated" out some of its juice and salt into the bowl after 15 minutes and I also drank that salty liquid up.
I am so crossing my fingers that this works. This is much better than eating cough medicines.
Shall keep you posted on the results of my experiment.
P/S - I actually wrote a post about Chiangmai since I was there in November but that takes a backseat to this.
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