Home Cure Care Packages

Enlarge Image Image Gallery St Johns Wort can aide in battling anxiety and depression.

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Magic Zoom Balls Recipe

As your children head off to college, you know they’ll pack what they think is important—trendy clothes, a stereo, post­ers for their dormitory room. But you’re a parent, so you mention winter coats and car insurance, all the while wondering what you can do to help your children stay healthy.

College campuses expose young adults to new health risks. For freshmen, that first year can be especially stressful as they experience a different lifestyle, one that often includes fast food, parties, and all-night study sessions. And all college students are at risk for colds, flu, and other common ailments, as well as more serious conditions, such as depression and sleep disorders associated with pressure to perform.

You can’t continually watch over your children as they go out into the world, but you can help them stay happy and healthy by slipping a few carefully selected herbal remedies into their luggage. We asked professionals with experience in herbal therapy to suggest items they would include in a college care package—alongside a tin of homemade chocolate chip cookies, of course.

Make it simple

College students are often too preoccupied to think about preventive health care—until they wind up in bed with a nasty cold.

“To get a young adult to take supplements is sometimes difficult,” says Hyla Cass, a psychiatrist who specializes in nutritional medicine. “Kids generally feel they’re invincible until they’re finally on their own and begin to get run down.”

Cass says her college-age daughter would handle illness by calling home to ask, “Mom, I’m sick—what do I do?” To help her daughter learn to take better care of herself, Cass began assembling care packages.

“When she’d come home, I’d give her things to take with her,” Cass says. “She always had echinacea, goldenseal, vitamin C, mycelized vitamin A, an herbal formula for sleep, and aloe vera juice for an upset stomach.”

Cass also recommends that parents use herbal combinations, such as echinacea/goldenseal, in a care package to keep the number of bottles to a minimum. She packs capsules rather than tinctures, which can be rather strong and offensive to sensitive taste buds. In addition, she advises common-sense caution—kids should not expect herbs to be a quick fix, and they shouldn’t overindulge in a purported remedy.

“Tell your kid to monitor carefully,” Cass says. “Don’t take anything arbitrarily”. You can help by sending remedies that your children have ­already been using at home.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print