The Ultimate Strep Throat Remedy (If You’re Brave Enough…)

The Ultimate Strep Throat Remedy (If You’re Brave Enough…)

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When I was pregnant with my daughter (who is now 3), I got strep throat.

It was awful. If you’ve ever had strep, you know the horrid knives-in-your-throat feeling I’m referring to. Ugh. I shudder just to think about it again.

I do my best to avoid antibiotics quite stringently. Being pregnant, that desire was especially strong. However, strep is a bacterial infection. Many people believe that bacterial infections will only respond to pharmaceutical antibiotics. From personal experience, I’m gonna have to disagree. Here’s how it went down…

It was a holiday weekend. In Tiny Town. The doctor saw me late Friday afternoon and took a swab to send to the lab for testing. He gave me a prescription just in case, though, because I wouldn’t be able to get the results until Tuesday, when they opened again.

I went home without filling the prescription. I told myself I would get it if I was feeling desperate, but I’d try googling for ideas first. I found tons of sore throat remedy ideas online. Most involved things like lemon and honey, etc. One of the suggestions involved a crazy ingredient: cayenne pepper. I decided to make my own concoction, and give it a whirl.

I developed this recipe that day, and have tweaked and perfected it in the couple of sore throats I’ve had since that time.

So, does it work?

Well, I gargled every 15 minutes for about 2 hours that evening. There was noticeable improvement after the first couple of times. I could swallow without tears coming to my eyes. Then, I felt about 75% healed by the next morning, and I felt no more pain at all 24 hours later. By the end of the weekend, I was back to normal, and just taking it a bit easy to allow my body to catch up.

The throat swab came back from the lab on Tuesday. It was a confirmed case of strep throat. And I healed it using the craziest cayenne pepper concoction ever! Natural remedies for the win!

(By the way, if you have a more minor sore throat – i.e. not strep – I’d advise trying gargling with good ol’ salt and water. Sometimes that does the trick just fine!)

The Ultimate Sore Throat Remedy

Print recipe

Ingredients

• 1 cup Strongly brewed lemon herbal tea (Other types of herbal teas may work too)
• 1 tablespoon Apple cider vinegar (I use Bragg's raw apple cider)
• 1 tablespoon Raw honey
• 1/4 teaspoon Cayenne pepper (Add more if you can - as much as you can stand)

Directions

Step 1	Brew tea, then mix everything else in. Stir well.
Step 2	Gargle with small sips of the tea. Get it as far back in your throat as you can and keep gargling as long as you can stand it. Spit it out, and repeat every 15-30 minutes for several hours. You should feel the burn of the cayenne (within reason!).