Fall is here, and the cold season is rapidly approaching. Nearly everyone at one point or another will have a cold.
In one year alone, Americans spend the equivalent of the national budget of all the Central American countries combined on cold remedies, a whopping $ 6 billion dollars, trying to alleviate or “cure” their colds.
All this in vain at the expense of the liver, kidneys and over-all body chemistry, not to mention the pocketbook.
In a futile attempt to gain temporary relief, we destroy our long range health. All drugs, whether over-the-counter or prescribed, have side-effects.
Our society still regards a cold as an illness we “catch” from someone who had it before us. Not so!
A cold is a normal, natural cleansing process. It is our body’s biological way of adapting to environmental changes that occur in the fall as we move into winter, and then again in the spring as summer arrives.
Colds occur at times when all of life outside goes through profound changes. In the fall, trees are shedding their leaves, lawns are turning brown, animal’s furs are becoming thicker, bees are moving underground, the list goes on as all of nature undergoes transformation.
By spring the resurgence of life can be seen everywhere as trees and shrubs buds, grass turns green, flowers spring up, and animals shed their winter coats.
We, as human beings, are part of nature, not apart from it. We are alive and, just like the rest of nature, are going through similar changes. We label this a cold! The symptoms we experience-stuffy nose, sneezing, coughing, scratchy throat, running eyes and sometimes fever- are normal processes our body goes through in order to clean the sinuses and upper respiratory tract.
In other words, a cold is the “menstruation” or shedding of the mucus lining of the sinuses and upper respiratory system.
No amount of medication will stop the process. Instead, it will temporarily suppress the symptoms while rendering the body more toxic.
As the late Dr. Robert Mendelsohn, M.D. put it in his book, Confession of a Medical Heretic, “A cold with medication lasts a week. Without it, it last seven days!”
Yet by suppressing the symptoms of a cold we may be paying dearly down the line. Recent studies have uncovered that during a cold, the body activate