Letha’s Asian Health Secrets

You haven’t heard from me in a little while. We drove south with Silky (our cat). She hates to be in a car so I placed her and her cat box into a large cardboard box, cut with breathing holes so that she could not watch the passing cars and get car sick. I did not feed her the evening before our driving days. We would drive a day, take off another so that her feeding and elimination could catch up. All went quite smoothly because I used a homeopathic remedy from the pet store called travel anxiety. I recognized a couple of the ingredients. One was for motion sickness another for stress. She did not complain. We brought our NYC cold with us and are coughing up beige chewing gum phlegm. I suppose it is because we live and breathe in NYC seven months a year. I am stuffed up and can’t breathe at night also because of the dense tropical vegetation. It might seem like an allergy, but we have come here to south Florida for the past 7 years and we have not had this hacking cough and congestion before.

It does not pay to try to remember where we got it. Taxis, Christmas parties, filming a TV appearance along with people with colds and fevers — It’s easy to get a germ in any big city. The important thing is to treat the discomforts and kill germs if necessary. I had come with a small bottle of Gan Mao Ling – a popular Chinese cold remedy that contains honeysuckle flower and other herbs to help sweat out an early mild cold. But sunning, swimming and sleeping in a jungle environment – kept the cold going.
I was delighted to find a Chinese pharmacy/grocery in a small town south of Miami today. I thought I found Heaven and was amongst old friends as I picked up boxes of Chinese patent remedy pills:

Breath Natural (Pe Min Kan) for sinus congestion
Contains: siler, fragrant angelica, xanthium and magnolia flower
Respiryn Extract (Ging gi hua tan wan) for phlegm and cough with weak digestion
Contains: skullcap (liver cleanser), trichosanthes, pinellia, arisaemantis, poria, tangerine peel, apricot seed, and ginger

Andrographitis extract – herbal antibiotic

Xiao Chuan tablet for asthma or bronchitis

An expectorant cough syrup made from herbs and sea coconut to loosen thick phlegm.

Now I could treat the symptoms and avoid the doctor’s office – which is full of coughing people.

My cold/cough is very different from my Bear. I tend to feel chilled and weak. He is hot tempered. His pulse is high and tongue red in the center – the digestive area. He likes sweets and his blood is more acidic than mine–mosquitos devour him! So his cold herbs should also be different from mine. I need warming (sweat inducing herbs) he need cooling herbs to thin his phlegm and also support elimination.
I called up Susan Lin at Lin Sisters herb shop in NYC – see the link at this site (Phone: 212 962 5417) and described his symptoms and she sent us 5 packs of a collection of herbs to cook for him. What a muddy brew I cooked in my crockpot! It had many cooling cleansing herbs, some to strengthen his kidney/adrenal energy and clear his lungs. He held his nose and drink it for a couple of days and felt much relieved.

I will continue with my warming drying herbs – ginger, pinellia and others in the pills I mentioned above. My tongue is always pale – even though my skin is getting nice and brown lately!