I don’t know about you but when I need sore throat remedies I look no further than my own kitchen cupboard. A nice cup of hot tea with honey and lemon usually does the trick. Tea is one of the best things you could drink if you are not feeling well. The antioxidants in tea, herbal or black, benefit your body in so many ways and improve your body’s function all the way down to the cellular level.
Raspberry tea is well known for it’s anti-inflammatory properties and you can drink it or gargle with it when you have a sore throat. I remember when I was pregnant the midwives had me drink raspberry tea the last two weeks of my pregnancy to decrease the amount of extra fluid I was carrying to lower my blood pressure. Lemon has vitamin C to help build your immune system and the acidity will help break up mucous and help balance your body’s pH. Honey has great anti-inflammatory properties and can help reduce any inflammation in your throat.
Most people forget that you can drink tea everyday. There doesn’t have to be a reason or an illness to make you get the tea out of the box and put a bag in a cup. It is very easy to heat up the water, only takes two minutes in the microwave. You don’t even need to wait for the kettle to boil to make your tea. Try a cup of tea in the morning instead of a cup of coffee. You get almost as much caffeine as you do with coffee and like I said before the antioxidant benefits are numerous.
Even if you do not like tea, there are so many different kinds out there now you are bound to find one or two that you like. I have a friend who swore she would never ever drink a cup of tea because she was forced to drink tea as a little girl when she got sick. I told her there was a reason for that. Tea just makes you feel good. Now she drinks green tea and some herbal teas because they do not taste like tea.
Other sore throat home remedies like a salt water gargle may make your throat feel better too. Start with about four ounces of water and make it as warm as you can stand it then put about a half teaspoon of salt in the water and stir it until the salt dissolves. Gargle by the mouthful until the water is all gone. This should make your throat stop hurting but you may need to keep doing this every few hours to keep it feeling better.
During my research into sore throat home remedies I came across a couple of remedies that I do not think anyone would touch with a ten foot pole. The first one is most popular in the Ukraine and consists of a cup of warm water with one tablespoon of honey and one tablespoon of vinegar. I think you would really have to like vinegar to use this one. The other is from Russia and you take a cup of warm water and mix in one tablespoon horseradish, one tablespoon honey, and one teaspoon dried cloves. Seems to me this would take some doing to keep from coming right back up but to each his own.
