When you feel like you're coming down with a cold or the flu, I just know you want to fight the illness and start feeling like yourself as soon as possible.
Traditional Chinese Medicine can help you strengthen your body's defenses to prevent illnesses and help you get better more quickly when an illness decides to take hold. This time of year, you'll find that the key to feeling better includes preventive maintenance...and cupping.
Proactive Planning
How to strengthen the body before illness strikes
Wash and moisturize your hands as often as you can! Your skin is one of your first defenses against pathogens—a term used for any cause of disease.
Get plenty of sleep. In an ideal world, you should be getting eight hours of uninterrupted rest every night.
Eat foods that are nourishing and easy to digest. Choose broth-based soups and stews, cooked grains and vegetables and organic meat. Replace coffee with green tea.
Manage your stress, meditate and breathe. Try to set aside just five minutes out of your busy day to relax, clear your mind, and take some deep breaths.
Bundle up! There's nothing quite like getting cozy this time of year.Put on your warmest gear, cover your neck, and be sure to protect your nose from the wind the next time you head outdoors.
Manage the Attack
It's time to get defensive with those pathogens
Eat and drink in a way that gives germs the heave-ho: eat plenty of broth-based soups and drink warm liquids. Be sure to add ginger, cinnamon, green onion and garlic to your foods if you have the chills, and if your symptoms have you on the warmer side, drink lots of peppermint tea and eat plenty of water-rich fruits. In both situations, avoid dairy, sugars/sweets and rich or fried foods.
Get cozy and rest. Keep wearing your warmest clothes and keep your skin and nose protected from the wind. This will help the body to sweat—a primary way that the body expels the pathogens. Rest and sleep.
Consult with a doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine. The various modalities of TCM can help ease your pain and shorten the duration of your illness.
Consider Cupping
Did you read "cupping" and immediately think of a post-workout remedy? You're probably not alone! The benefits of cupping are vast: it can help reduce pain, eliminate toxins, and even lower a person's cholesterol! Another thing that cupping is great for is to help boost immune strength.
When winter rears its ugly head, it's time to start thinking about immunity, and planning to make it through the season without getting sick.
To help boost immunity, I focus the cupping treatment on the focal point of the immune system: the neck, upper back, and shoulders. Keeping this zone free, clear and flowing is an absolute must in all treatments for those with chronic colds, sinus infections, respiratory infections, and cough.
The suction from cupping frees the stagnated circulation in tissues and pulls toxins out to the surface, where they are properly metabolized and removed from the system. This leaves many with red or purple cupping marks. While these marks look like a painful bruise, they are not. The force from a bruise breaks healthy and stagnated capillaries, whereas cupping only affects those that are stagnated and full of pressure. Healthy tissue does not bruise, and it does not produce any sort of marks or bruising from the force of cupping. All this to say: cupping will not cause pain.
Cupping will give you back the energy you once lost to the tension of an oncoming or active cold. Post-cupping, patients with an oncoming cold often notice the disappearance of runny nose, head fog, stiffness and aching, and that hard-to-describe feeling of "coming down" with something. For those with a cold or flu already in full swing, cupping helps the illness run its course more rapidly and prevent any lingering symptoms.
Want To Go Under the Cup?
Colds and seasonal respiratory illnesses can cause so much discomfort, pain, lethargy, and take time away from our loved ones. Get one step ahead of the dreaded cold and flu season by booking your cupping appointment today!
Contact Everybody Healing Center today to begin living fully and breathing easily once again!
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