Garlic and Honey Medicine

I really struggled to get up this (very cold and unwelcoming) March morning; my nearly-3-year-old daughter went to bed coughing and it just got worse every hour. At 11pm I decided I had to do something, and with a somewhat less than enthusiastic view on calling the out of hours GP service (I'll write more on that another day...in the meantime, if you want a bit of an eye-opener on allopathic medicine, check out this website) I decided to make another batch of garlic medicine.

Now, I know a lot about garlic and I really don't hesitate to shout it from the rooftops round here where I live, because there always seems to be someone who has something or a mum who can't rid of her child's ear infections or tonsillitis or whatever, and I always say "take garlic!". But it wasn't until last Christmas time, when my kids (all 3 of them) got Whooping Cough that I really started taking this stuff seriously. I threw together my first batch of this medicine at 4am on the 21st of December, while waiting for a call back from the out of hours service that didn't happen until around 7am; just as we were falling asleep, of course.

My husband was on night shift and although my daughter had taken a full prescription of antibiotics (I was told at the call back that she'd been given the wrong type anyway) she was still presenting with high fevers and not only was her cough getting worse, her breath had turned putrid, a clear indicator to me that there was something more afoot than just the Whooping cough. So at about 3am, after I called the docs, I was sitting with her propped up against my shoulder and with the window open to combat the heat coming off her, and googling complications of Whooping cough to see if I could pin point what her symptoms could be indicating. PLEASE NOTE: I DO NOT ADVOCATE GOOGLE AS A DIAGNOSTIC TOOL, ONLY AN INFORMATION SOURCE WHILE YOU WAIT FOR PROPER ADVICE!!

I found some information on the NHS Direct site that indicated she was heading for Bronchitis or even Pneumonia and at that point, frightened enough to feel the edge of panic sliding in (I was also, amongst all of this, preparing for our first Christmas with everyone at our house, might I add) I searched for herbal remedies to combat infections. Guess what the first ingredient was that came up? Yup, garlic. Here's a little exerpt from one of the pages I found by Jon Barron, who talks about how antiobitics only attack  from one direction and how garlic works in hundreds of ways (read the rest here):

"Take garlic for example

For a long time, many people thought there was only one active component in garlic, allicin (in fact, many companies still promote that concept). It was believed that raw garlic had very little biological activity, but when you "damage" garlic cloves - by slicing, cooking, or chewing them - the enzyme alliinase immediately converts non-active alliin into the active ingredient, allicin.
As I mentioned, it was once thought that allicin was garlic's principal active ingredient. However, researchers now know that allicin is rapidly oxidized. In the process of oxidation, allicin breaks down into more than 100 biologically active sulfur-containing compounds. While allicin may still serve as a general marker of garlic's potency, research increasingly points to S-allylcysteine and other compounds as the most therapeutically active ingredients in garlic.
So how many possible pathogenic defense combinations can you get from garlic's 100 biologically active compounds? A whole bunch!! Thousands and thousands and thousands, in fact!
The formula for finding the number of combinations of k objects you can choose from a set of n objects is:
                   n!
n_C_k = ----------
             k!(n - k)!
With 100 objects/compounds to work with and possible combinations ranging from any 2 of them to any 99 of them, the complexity is just far, far, far too much for simple pathogens to evolve around.
And that's the secret. But it gets even better.
When you combine several natural substances in one formula, the combinations of compounds are beyond counting. Quite simply, microbes cannot evolve around them."


Now, what this told me was that not only was I right about garlic being the best, but that I was way more right than I ever realised. I had never read anything as indepth or scientific as this in the short months I'd been self-studing herbalism and as an avid fan of biology I not only understood the implications of such excellent information, I saw it as a lifeline and a means to forego the unpleasantness of allopathic antibiotics (such as the destruction of beneficial bacteria in the gut) unless absolutely necessary. Along with the other ingredients he speaks about, and information from other herbalist websites, I formed a rough list of good things to put together and how they were best prepared, put my then (thankfully) sleeping daughter down on some propped up pillows and headed for the kitchen to see what I had.

This is what I pulled out the cupboards:
2 bulbs of organic garlic that needed using up since they were sprouting
Last few drops of Apple Cider Vinegar, about a tablespoon
powdered ginger and turmeric
3 lemons
Some vitamin C powder
2 jars of honey
Some old medicine bottles and a jar (my husband really hates my jar collection, but I prove its use time and again!)
Cold water sterilisation liquid

I took photos as I went to make sure that (a) I didn't forget what I put in it and (b) in case I ever did get round to creating this blog! So glad I did, because I didn't write down the recipe until a couple of days later (when I was sure it really really did work) and had trouble remembering everything...

So I set to work on the garlic first, peeling, flattening with the blade of the knife and coursely chopping each clove, while the kettle boiled. This gave the garlic some time to oxidise before I even started cooking it.

I put the bottles and jar in a solution of the sterilisation liquid,

 

and measured 2 tablespoons of ginger and 1 tablespoon of turmeric into my little glass pot. (Glass seems to prevent a mettallic taste and smell entering my homemade products and I like the fact that it's completely inert.) I poured 500ml of boiling water into the pot and added the garlic, setting it over a low/medium heat and added the rind of one of the lemons.

Once it had simmered very gently for around 10mins I took it off the heat to cool with the lid on. I got to work juicing all of the lemons

Upside down funnel in a jug works in a pinch if you don't have a juicer ;-)

 and dissolving a tablespoon of the Vit C powder into it, before adding the last bit of ACV (I didn't measure it, but it looked about a tablespoon, though more would be beneficial if you have it, just be careful not to make it too sharp). Once the garlic decoction had cooled to body temperature (dip a clean finger in to test; this is because ayurvedics believe that honey shouldn't be heated above 40°C if it is to be ingested and I also wouldn't want to kill off any of those all-important beneficial enzymes) I strained the decoction with an ordinary kitchen seive

 and added the lemon juice mix. I measured it and had around 500ml all together and so added half that amount in honey (250ml).

For all that it completely stank up the kitchen (and the house for the next couple of days) it actually tasted quite pleasant; strong, but not bad. I took the bottles and caps out of the strilisation liquid and dried the outsides, lined them up and with a funnel decanted the whole lot into the bottles to the very top. I didn't want any air to be trapped inside to prevent it going off. I sealed them up quick and took the last bit that didn't fit in the bottles upstairs to my daughter, who'd woken up just a few minutes before I'd finished, with another coughing fit.

This was around 5am. I gave her two 5ml measures and after about half an hour she dozed off again, but I was too busy watching her temperature to see if her fever would come down to sleep much. By the time I'd gotten the call back at around 7am her temperature was all but normal and she was sleeping soundly, so I told them I'd see how she went and call them again if I needed to.

But I didn't need to; her temperature stabilised and she even started eating again, something she hadn't done much of the two weeks prior. She'd lost a lot weight with the vomiting after the coughing fits and lack of desire to eat, but it was a bit of baby blubber she could afford to lose, thankfully. My oldest I gave high strength garlic capsules to from the minute he woke up with the fever and that awful cough and he sailed through the disease. My middle son got through without much fuss too and only a few doses of the garlic medicine, but he'd only just had the preschool booster a few months before, and I imagine his immunity was still high.

So when it came to my daughter getting another chesty bug last night, and having used up the bottles of garlic medicine I hadn't given away, I needed to make a new batch last night. I had to substitute Rosehip tea bags, which are 50% rosehip and 50% hibiscus, for the lemons and I didn't have any ACV so used white wine vinegar (I have no idea if my theory of it being similiar for the resveretrol content of the wine used to make it is anything to go by, but I figured it couldn't hurt). So it has a lively red colour this time thanks to the hibiscus, but worked just as well, and though she was still off her food today, her cough has decreased in severity and she is currently sleeping quite soundly.

Last night's batch, made a bit more than the time before, not sure why!

So if you or anyone you know is suffering with the endless bugs doing the rounds this Spring (I hesitate to say Spring now with the foul weather we are having...) knock up a batch of this stuff, and watch the magic of nature heal without harm.