How to Get Rid of a Cold Fast, and What Six Countries Swear By

Chicken soup is the rare folk remedy with a recipe preserved in a medical journal.

The first study ran in Chest in 1978. Fifteen healthy adults drank hot chicken soup, and within five minutes the velocity of their nasal mucus rose from 6.9 to 9.2 millimeters per minute. Faster mucus clearance is what a congested nose wants. The detail that makes the study worth remembering is the control: plain hot water also raised the number, from 6.2 to 8.4, and both beat cold water and sipping through a straw.

The sequel came in 2000, in the same journal. Chicken soup inhibited the movement of neutrophils, the immune cells behind much of a cold's misery, in laboratory glassware. The authors published the recipe they tested, credited as grandma's soup: chicken, onions, sweet potatoes, parsnips, turnips, carrots, celery stems and parsley, with salt and pepper. They also noted, in the abstract itself, that commercial soups varied widely in the effect.

The least romantic reading of both papers is probably the correct one. Hot water alone moved the needle, so the heat and the fluid are doing much of the work, whatever floats in them. Outside the kitchen, the CDC's advice applies: rest, fluids, a humidifier, no OTC cough and cold medicine for children under six, and a test when covid or flu is a possibility.

In Britain, honey and lemon for a cough is not a folk remedy. It is government guidance. NICE's acute cough guideline places honey first among self-care options, and the committee's framing at publication was that a spoonful of honey, or a honey and lemon drink, is a good first step. The guideline arrived as part of a package to cut antibiotic prescribing and slow antimicrobial resistance.

The routing is deliberate too. The NHS points cold sufferers to the pharmacy, not the clinic. Its list is specific: paracetamol or ibuprofen, decongestant nasal sprays for no more than a week, no decongestants at all for children under six, and a warning against stacking paracetamol tablets on top of a combination cold remedy that already contains it.

France is the one country in this article that used to pay for a cold-season remedy and then, deliberately, stopped. Social security reimbursement for homeopathic products dropped from 30 to 15 percent in January 2020 and hit zero in January 2021, after the national health authority concluded that their clinical usefulness did not justify the spending. The delisting covered Oscillococcinum, a product sold for flu-like symptoms.

The sums were not trivial. In 2018 the French system reimbursed 126.8 million euros for homeopathy. France is the world's largest homeopathy market, and Boiron, the biggest manufacturer, is a French company. Boiron objected, an online petition circulated, and the decision held. A folk belief met an evidence review, and the review won.

German cold season carries the name of a 19th-century priest. Sebastian Kneipp, a Catholic clergyman and a pioneer of the nature-cure movement, built his institution in Bad Wörishofen. His five pillars were water therapy, plant remedies, exercise, nutrition and inner order, and the Kneipp association still suggests linden flower and elderflower tea for warding off winter colds.

There is also the cold-remedy bath, warm water with eucalyptus, camphor or conifer-needle oils, used for respiratory complaints. For fever, the classic home measure is the calf wrap, damp cloths around the lower legs. That one comes with a warning that must travel with it: the risk of circulatory collapse means it is never used on babies under six months.

A note on sourcing. Beyond the Kneipp association, primary institutional sources for this section are thin, so it records that these customs exist and claims nothing further.

In Japan, the traditional remedy shows up somewhere unexpected: the prescription pad. A set of 148 kampo herbal formulas is covered by national health insurance, and any physician can prescribe them, not just kampo specialists. The most prescribed of all is kakkonto, a formula reached for at the first sign of a cold, followed by shoseiryuto and maoto. Prescriptions are short, typically five to seven days.

The scale is documented. In a claims database of 4.5 million people, 13.5 percent received a kampo prescription within a year, 54 percent of users were women, and 85 percent of kampo prescriptions came alongside Western drugs. A study of women around pregnancy found kakkonto the most prescribed formula there too, mostly, the authors note, for colds.

Korea's ssanghwatang, which appears below, is a traditional formula you buy over the counter as a tonic. Japan took a similar inheritance and wired it into the reimbursement system. Same root, different socket.

A Korean cold runs on two tracks. At home there is honey water, ginger tea, jujube tea, steamed pear stuffed with honey, and bean sprout soup. Each comes with fine print from practitioners of traditional Korean medicine: honey coats the throat but its thickness can hinder clearing a phlegmy cough, people managing blood sugar should watch the amount, and ginger, which warms the body, is to be avoided with a high fever or a badly swollen throat.

The pharmacy shelf holds ssanghwatang, a formula recorded in the 17th-century medical text Donguibogam. The national institute for Korean medicine is unambiguous about it: ssanghwatang is not a cold medicine. It is a restorative tonic that may help prevent colds by shoring up stamina, which is a narrower claim than its reputation.

Then there is the clinic track. In 2023 claims data, antibiotics were prescribed in 41.42 percent of visits for acute upper respiratory infections, the category that includes colds, against a national target of 22 percent. The rate had fallen from 73.33 percent in 2002 to roughly half that over two decades, then rebounded after the pandemic. For a virus that antibiotics cannot treat, four visits in ten still end with them.

Put the six countries side by side and two axes emerge. On the ingredient axis the verdict is in: whatever goes in the pot, heat and fluids are the common denominator. The neighbouring kitchen remedy came out the same way, with the strongest item on the list not a food at all: why the American pediatric society stopped recommending BRAT, and why oral rehydration solution sits on the WHO's essential medicines list. The institutional axis is where countries actually diverge. Japan folded a traditional formula into public insurance. France pushed a popular remedy out of it. Same cold, opposite rulings, and each side ran an evidence review to get there.