🌸 Spring = Wind Season 🌬️｜Let’s Talk About Wind-Cold Type Colds 🤧

As mentioned before, spring is the season of wind. Today, let’s talk about wind-cold colds. In the UK, the common cold we frequently experience is mostly classified as wind-cold in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).

TCM classifies colds based on symptoms, whereas Western medicine classifies them based on types of viruses. After this explanation, you’ll better understand why TCM categorizes colds this way.

🌀 Early Stage Symptoms of Wind-Cold Colds:

• Fever

• Runny nose

• Sneezing

• Headache

• Cough

At this stage, the mucus is usually clear and thin. In TCM, these early symptoms are considered superficial (exterior signs) because wind-cold enters the body from the surface and then moves deeper. Therefore, we first experience these exterior symptoms.

When the body’s first line of defense—like the skin or nasal passages—fails, wind-cold penetrates deeper into the body. In the middle to later stages, symptoms may include:

• Sore throat

• Cough

• Yellow phlegm

These indicate that the wind-cold has reached the lungs, which means the condition is more serious.

🔥 Fever as a Healing Response

Fever is actually a natural response of the immune system. When the whole family gets sick, you’ll often find that children get fevers more easily than adults, because their immune systems are more active.

In fact, fever is the body’s best medicine—elevated temperature helps suppress viruses and bacteria. While fever may seem like a severe symptom, it’s actually the body’s natural healing process.

Many times, we forget this biological function and rush to take fever-reducing medicine, which only suppresses the symptom without helping the body recover. In many cases, I don’t recommend fever medication, especially in the early stages of a cold.

You’ll often find that after a child has a fever and sweats, their condition improves significantly. In TCM, this sweating process is the body expelling internal wind-cold pathogens, and it’s the key principle in treating wind-cold colds.

You’ll also notice that Western medicine doesn’t treat the root cause of the cold but focuses on suppressing symptoms.

🌱 Natural Treatments for Wind-Cold Colds

By now, you should understand that fever and sweating are actually beneficial to the body. So when experiencing a wind-cold cold, I recommend the following home remedies to support natural sweating:

1: Ginger Tea

• Use 3–4 slices of fresh ginger

• Optional: add 1–2 red dates (cut open)

• Boil with 100–200 mL of water for 2–3 minutes

• Add black sugar or honey

• Drink 2–3 times a day

• Slight sweating after drinking means it’s working

• Continue until symptoms resolve

2: Foot Soak

• Use a foot basin with water at around 40°C

• Add sea salt and a few drops of ginger essential oil, or ginger water

• Soak for 20 minutes

• The body should sweat slightly afterward

3: Acupressure Massage

• Fengchi (GB20) point is one of the gateways where wind enters or leaves the body

• Massage this point and Back Shu points to boost immunity and promote sweating to release the wind

🌿 Herbal Medicine for Wind-Cold Colds

There are many classic TCM formulas that effectively treat wind-cold colds, such as:

• Xiao Qing Long Tang (Minor Blue Dragon Decoction)

• Gui Zhi Tang (Cinnamon Twig Decoction)

• Ma Huang Tang (Ephedra Decoction)

Case Example:

A child presented with fever, runny nose, and sweating. I prescribed a modified Gui Zhi Tang.

The next day, the child began sneezing more frequently. I advised increasing the dosage from twice a day to three times a day.

After two days, the exterior symptoms disappeared, but the child still had a cough.

At the follow-up, I prescribed herbs to soothe the throat, such as loquat leaf, magnolia bark, platycodon root, and purple aster.

Many Chinese herbs are excellent for strengthening the lungs, protecting the throat, and relieving cough and phlegm, offering significant help in recovering from post-cold coughs.