Your Complete Guide to Home Remedies: Safe, Dangerous, Fake, and Everything in Between

This post is part of our Home Remedies Guide , a review of home remedies from dubious to doctor-approved. Read more here .

There is a saying that we have a name for alternative medicine that really works: “medicine”. And, of course, you don’t want to mess around with unproven therapies when your health is at stake. But home remedies are not necessarily an alternative to pharmaceutical or surgical treatments. They are often part of proper medical care. It’s not unusual for a pediatrician to say that your sleepy toddler needs rest and fluids more than antibiotics or cough medicine .

So, let’s go explore the world of home remedies. I would like to draw a map of the landscape with all its sights and pitfalls. On the home remedy map, there are places we should probably all visit someday , and there are places we should avoid .

“Supportive care” you can give your body

Our body takes pretty good care of itself. For example, if you have a cold, there is no medicine that can make the virus go away . Our immune system has to do this. So what can we do? Support our body’s ability to do this.

In medicine, they talk about “supportive care” when you have a condition for which there is no specific antidote. This means your body can easily get everything it needs and treat symptoms as needed so you don’t feel worse than you should. In a hospital, this can mean things like intravenous fluids, supplemental oxygen, and blood transfusions. At home, this might include the classic “sick day” support : fluids (like chicken soup), rest, maybe Tylenol.

Supportive care is great and these things are the backbone of home remedies. Help your body help itself and stay in touch with your doctor to know when your symptoms are severe enough to require medical attention.

Self-care ‘remedies’ you can make at home

Then we have things that can affect how our body works, but they are a little more specific than rest and fluids. Perhaps this is part of maintenance therapy, but I would like to elaborate on this.

For example, you can rinse your sinuses with a neti pot or gargle with salt water to soothe an irritated mouth . You can apply ice or heat to wounds , or oatmeal to itchy skin , or change your diet to relieve constipation .

These tough self-care tasks make up many of our top home remedies. These are generally safe to do at home, but feel free to check with your doctor about what works best for you and how to recognize symptoms that require care beyond the basics.

OTC home remedies

We can think of over-the-counter (OTC) medicines as home remedies in a sense: if you have Advil, antifungal cream, and wart remover in your medicine cabinet (to name but a few), you can make fewer trips to the doctor. Your doctor may even send you home from your appointment not with a prescription, but with instructions on what to buy at the pharmacy and how to use it.

However, it is important to know which over-the-counter drugs are useful and for what purposes. You can’t always trust the package to clearly tell you what you need to know. For example, cough and cold medicines are not suitable for toddlers . Some over-the-counter medications may interact with other medications you may be taking or may not be suitable for certain medical conditions. Some labels are so misleading that you can buy two different drugs that appear to have the same or overlapping ingredients.

And many stores sell homeopathic “medicines” mixed with real ones. Homeopathy is an outdated pseudo-medical practice that has entered FDA regulations. Result: Products without active ingredients can be sold as if they were medicines . A truly depressing number of children’s over-the-counter drugs fall into this category. In many cases, they do not contain an active ingredient and are simply a waste of money. But in others, they contain enough of the harmful active ingredient to presumably cause permanent injury or death .

Useless Placebos and Potentially Toxic Drugs

Then we have things that make it feel like we’re doing something to solve a health problem, but are probably doing nothing or might even be harmful.

For example: applying toothpaste to pimples. This can dry out the pimple, but it can also irritate the skin and increase redness. Or smear the burn with oil : You put extra rubbish in the wound, but for what reason? Simply place this burn under running water to cool it and keep it clean.

These “drugs” can also be harmful in the sense that they prevent us from seeking medical help or trying something more effective. And in some cases, they can cause serious harm by causing complications or drug interactions. We ‘ll name some of the worst of this group so you know to stay away from them.

Gray areas

Herbal medicines, including teas and essential oils , operate in the same real world as other medicines. They don’t get a pass without side effects just because they’re natural.

As a general rule, any drug strong enough to work can also cause side effects. And if you take the trouble to use a natural remedy on yourself, you must do so with the same care as if you were using a modern pharmaceutical drug. Do you really know the dosage you are receiving? Are you aware of possible side effects? We’ve discussed this before in the context of homemade abortions: it seems that pennyroyal oil is just as likely to kill you as it is to abort a pregnancy .

On the other end of the spectrum, we have things that might work but are not proven and most likely do nothing. Echinacea, for example, has shown promising results in several studies, but deeper analysis has shown that it just doesn’t work for the common cold . This is not to say that there are no tinctures, teas, or herbal capsules that can be used as home remedies; just that the supplement department has ups and downs like the rest of medicine, but with less legal oversight.

Some of these tools may be useful, but science does not yet fully understand them; or they may be harmful, and the results are not yet fully documented. They can waste your money and time, and with many diseases, time is of the essence. You don’t want to spend weeks trying a supplement when you needed to run to the doctor, or a year chasing other and better supplements when you really needed timely professional help.

When to See a Doctor

So how do we know when a home remedy is right? The big and obvious answer is: you can ask your doctor. Home remedies are not about avoiding medical care, but about things we can and should do ourselves. If you’re drawn to home remedies because they sound “natural” or because you enjoy being able to do things on your own, make sure you really test yourself to see if you’re doing the best thing for yourself or for the person with which you work. repeated care.

And even if the reason is cost or time, you still don’t have to go it alone. Many health insurance plans have a free nurse line where you can get quick advice. Telemedicine appointments with a doctor are often significantly cheaper and faster than making an office appointment. While Dr. Google isn’t a substitute for a human doctor, it’s worth checking out health organizations’ websites, such as healthchildren.org , run by the American Pediatric Association, or aad.org , run by the American Dermatological Association. .

So don’t hesitate to contact your doctor before using a home remedy, even if you’re pretty sure they’ll say it’s okay. Home remedies may be appropriate for minor problems that don’t yet require a visit to a doctor, but you should seek medical attention in case things seem serious, get worse, or don’t go away quickly. You don’t want to face complications after a week and should tell the doctor that you didn’t come because Lifehacker said you can treat it yourself.