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Chinese Medicine and the Common Cold


While in Western medicine a Cold only differs by its severity – basically stating how miserable you felt (feel free to exaggerate for compassion points .. 😉), Chinese medicine has two opposing causes for a Cold, namely ‘Wind-Heat’ and ‘Wind-Cold’ - and as my avid readers will already guess, the symptoms are slightly different.


Heat causes sweating, feeling overheated, thirst, scratchy throat, splitting headache, congested nose (with slightly/strongly yellow mucus), often with fever.


Cold on the other side causes shivering/ freezing, a stiff neck, headaches more like rising up from the neck, clear/ white nasal mucus, no/ mild fever, and sometimes a cough with clear mucus.

Wind means that a pathogen has only recently entered your body from the outside and is now moving around in your body, causing havoc.


Ginger tea or cinnamon are both warming, peppermint or honeysuckle tea are nice and cooling; rest, enough liquids and no heavy foods. Or order some herbs, but be quick about it. In order to be really effective, treatment should start not later than 48h after onset.

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