Those who know me, know that in my past life I well and truly drank the cool-aid. Any cool-aid, peddled by any snake-oil merchant. Yes, I was neck deep in the woo. And at the first signs of a head-cold I fell straight back into my old ways. I loaded on the garlic (meant to be an antibiotic), drunk my body weight in orange juice (for the vitamin c) and started my routine of lymphatic drainage massage.
There may (or may not) be some level of credibility in the garlic claim and at least the orange juice was keeping me hydrated, but lymphatic drainage? During a warm shower, which did wonders for my crashing headache, it occurred to me that I learned all about this Lymph-stuff while I was studying at the Australian College of Natural Medicine. Maybe that shower is responsible for finally clearing my mind, but the alarm bells started to ring.
I Googled it.
What I found was that Lymphatic Drainage was used to "detox" and "remove toxins". Oh no. Furthermore, the only clinics to offer a lymph massage service were, you guessed it, Natural therapies clinics. Even Wikipedia said:
" Scientific studies show mixed results regarding the efficacy of the method"
and
"studies on animals has MLDT (Manual lymphatic drainage treatment) been shown to increase lymph uptake and thoracic duct flow, but the same evidence has not yet been shown for human subjects"
My heart sank. The moment I felt sick, achy and sore I lost all ability to critically think. I reached straight my old pseudo-science, placebo at-best, treatments from my dark past. And just for the record- my debilitating headaches (I would go as far as to said they were migraines) knocked me out for 2 days, during which time it appears these remedies did very little. Anecdotal or not, the fact remains that, my cold still rages. If anything, it's worse. But I finally have a GP appointment at 3 pm this afternoon. Bring on the Science!
