The start of the pandemic saw a renewed awareness of basic sanitary rules such as washing your hands regularly, correctly sneeze or cough and refrain from unnecessarily touching your eyes and mouth. This made life much harder for all the other nasty little bugs like the flu or the common cold. Now, with the changing weather and Autumn slowly approaching, runny noses will become more of an issue again.
Chinese medicine separates two main pathologies in the Wind-Invasion category. Wind-Heat and Wind-Cold. The names are pretty much self-explanatory: Wind is fast, a Wind-Invasion means that a seemingly healthy body suddenly gets ‘invaded’ by a pathogen. A ‘Cold’ pathogen causes shivers without much sweating, a stiff neck, a runny nose and more likely settle in the lungs with cough. A ‘Heat’ pathogen is more of an irritant; the patient will have a runny nose as well, but with more congestion, plus a sore throat, headache, feel hot and irritable and may be sweating.
In both cases, herbs and acupuncture points concentrate on expelling Wind from the body. Additionally, in Wind-Heat, the focus will be on cooling, while in Wind-Cold, the emphasis is on warming the body.
It is important to get treatment as soon as possible, preferably within the first 24-48 hours of the appearance of any symptoms in order to stop the Wind-Heat or Wind-Cold from settling in.