To the Editor:
I’m a 64-year-old woman who has been completely unafraid of this virus and has been going about my business unvaxxed and mostly unmasked for 2 years and no one is interested in how I’ve stayed healthy. No one! It’s quite amazing. I keep thinking someone will say: Wow! What‘s your secret?! But, no. I’ve been discriminated against and punished and treated like a complete alien for 2 years—for the crime of being healthy and knowing how to take care of myself.
Anyway, here’s my secret: All of that mucosal tissue around the eyes, inside the nose, inside the throat, it’s the first line of defense of the immune system and it can all be ‘washed’ just like one’s hands. The easiest way I have found to do it (and this was a suggestion from my own GP once) is to put a pot of water on the stove, get it simmering, put my head over it, and breathe the steam through my nose, into my mouth, deep into my lungs—for like only a minute, but repeatedly, if need be. I have an ionizer in my bedroom that I’ll turn on and sit in front of for the same reasons (the beginning of an itchy nose or a scratchy throat). But, if you don’t have an ionizer, I read that colliding molecules create negative ions, so apparently you get that benefit along with the heat and humidity of the steam to soothe and ‘clean’ all of that tissue.
But, I’ve done it the moment I’ve felt the least bit dodgy: If I came home from a shopping trip with a slightly scratchy throat. If I woke up in the middle of the night coughing, I would drag myself to the kitchen and do it. Or get up and turn on my ionizer for a little while.
Rinsing your eyes or nose with a saline nasal spray or contact lens saline solution is also helpful. Gargling with hot, salt water, too. My surgeon-Dad would yell at us to go do it all the time when we were kids, when we were sick with a cold. And my Mom would drag out the big glass jar vaporizer… The medical world now calls that a nebulizer. And you don’t need to buy one or spend any money. Simple, simple, old-fashioned stuff… Apparently most doctors have either forgotten this or never learned it in the first place.
I am utterly gob-smacked by the doctors and public health officials who can’t speak in a more meaningful way about maintaining a healthy immune system than: masks, social distancing, and vaccines. I maintain steadfastly that this pandemic has been managed for maximum fear, maximum stress, maximum pollution, and hence—maximum illness.
One last bit of advice: Do not walk around with a mask on outside! Take every opportunity to get fresh air into your lungs.
Jacqueline Brook
Putney