POSTING #61

Coughs, Colds and Ginseng

I've been fighting a cold this week and as a result my brain keeps going off in all directions.

I'm afraid that this week's stories are, therefore, going to be a bit of a hodge-podge rather than the elegantly linked and balanced selection that I usually achieve. (Yeah, right!)

But first, as CNN says, some Breaking News.

I spotted the year's first robins on Monday, February 22nd, stepping daintily over ridges of snow and pecking at the frozen earth. It may be my paranoia but I thought I saw the male look up at the ledge above our front door, the site of The War of the Robins back in the spring of 2008---click here for an account of that battle (Posting #10, March 8, 2009).

I'm really hoping the robins will find a nesting spot somewhere else so we don't have to go to war again!

000

A joke that wowed us in Grade One was, "When is the best time to see pigs?"

Answer: "When you have a sty in your eye."

I know: "Groan, Groan"!

Perhaps the best time to talk about coughs and colds is when your head is stuffed up.

So here goes.

When I was growing up treatment for the common cold went through several phases.

First, a scratchy throat was treated with cough drops, the favourite being the hard, black licorice flavoured cough candies produced by the bearded Smith Brothers.

If a sore throat turned into a cough and congestion, my family always turned to Buckley's Mixture.

Growing up in the 1930s and 1940s, we were used to medicines that had a nasty taste such as, cod live oil, castor oil, and that favourite spring tonic and de-wormer, sulphur and molasses.

In a time before scientific, double blind studies, people seemed to judge the efficacy of a medicine by how bad it tasted or smelled (think of Absorbine Jr, the liniment favoured by weekend athletes).

But the worst tasting was undoubtedly Buckley's Mixture. (Click here for a fun history of Buckley's)

Even my parents, who could be pretty stoical about discomfort and pain, couldn't stop the fearsome grimaces that always accompany the swallowing of Buckley's Mixture.

I know from feedback that this blog has readers in other countries, readers who I am reasonably sure have never tasted Buckley's Mixture. I would like to be able to convey to them the sheer awfulness of the taste of Buckley's. But I am afraid it is beyond my command of the English language.

I have tried.

I jotted down some thoughts using the approach of wine tasters.

"The first note on the palate is a mix of pine and spruce gums that while unexpected is not wholly unpleasant. But then there is a wallop of ammonia that literally takes one's breath away."

That's something like it but as anyone who has taken Buckley's will tell you there's a whole lot more to the awfulness of the stuff.

I have admired how the Buckley's people resisted the shift from nasty tasting medicines to sweet tasting concoctions that required the invention of child-proof lids.

And I've also admired the marketing genius of the Buckley's people who have turned a negative into a roaring positive with great advertising.

"It tastes awful. And it works."

One of the company executives is supposed to have coined a neat double entendre, “We’re #1, But We Taste Like #2”

Although, the company has broadened its line of cough medicines by adding a cough suppressant, dextromethorphan (DM), to some of them, I have stuck with the 'Original'---I have a mild case of asthma and cough suppression is not a good thing.

I have always taken Buckley's Mixture on my overseas consulting assignments.

While working in Amman Jordan in 2001, I ran out of Buckley's. I went to see a local doctor recommended by the Canadian Embassy and showing him the empty bottle asked if Jordan had something similar.

He squinted and frowned as he looked at the ingredients: Canada balsam, ammonium carbonate, camphor, glycerine and pine needle oil, among other things.

"I am positive we do not have anything like THIS!", he said, shaking his head.

After I explained that I could not use anything with DM, he thought for a bit and then jotted down the name of a German natural remedy that might work.

The German cough syrup listed a number of herbal ingredients---including 'snake venom'.

Kill you or cure you, I guess.

It was dark brown, with an unpleasant 'mediciney' taste but nothing approaching the awfulness of the taste of Buckley's.

And it didn't work nearly as well, either.

000

When I set off in 2002 for what was to be a two year assignment in Baku, Azerbaijan, I packed four large bottles of Buckley's.

Unfortunately, I had to return home after just five months because of illness.

We had bought some rugs and there wasn't room in our suitcases for the four untouched bottles of Buckley's.

We left them for the landlord and I have often wondered what happened to them. Azerbaijan was a poor country and nothing got thrown out so I am sure they were used for something.

My fantasy is that the landlord carried them in his Mercedes and whenever he got stopped by Baku's notorious traffic police---in one of their periodic shakedowns---he gave them a bottle instead of money. He was a glib fellow and I can see him telling the police that this was the latest medical breakthrough from the West.

And in my imagination I can see the officer taking a spoonful, and then doubling over.

And then---unfortunately---feeling better.

000

Back to when I was young.

If Buckley's didn't stop the cold, the next remedy was Vick's VapoRub rubbed into the chest. It tingled a bit on the skin and the menthol vapours seemed to help the congestion.

If that didn't work, and the cold was 'going down into the chest', then Mom moved to the 'nuclear option', the mustard plaster.

She would make a paste of Keen's Mustard, flour and some water, and then spread it on a piece of woolen fabric (often taken as I recall from a discarded pair of my Dad's Stanfield's long underwear). The plaster was then put on the chest,---with the paste side away from the skin so it didn't burn it--- and left for thirty minutes or so.

When the plaster was peeled off, the skin was bright red. It stayed red for several hours, sending heat, I assume, to the bronchial tubes to help clear them.

Did mustard plasters work?

I don't know but I am sure they made my parents feel better. They were doing something to help a wheezing child.

And mustard plasters didn't smell as bad as a remedy used by some other families in Arthur, the onion poultice.

But that's another story.

000

With my current cold, in addition to Buckley's, I am experimenting with COLD-FX, which my brother and sister-in-law have found helpful.

According to the box, the main ingredient of COLD-FX appears to be an extract from North American ginseng.

The reference to ginseng reminded me of a story from the Russian project.

I was finishing off some reports in my Moscow office getting ready to leave for a trip home to Ottawa. Boris, (not his real name) a Federal Employment official from Siberia, whom we had visited on a trip to Russia's Far East, dropped into the office.

Through Yuri, my office manager and interpreter, the visiting official said that he had heard that I was going back to Canada and he had brought me a gift.

With that Boris opened a brown paper bag and pulled out a recycled jam jar filled with a milky liquid with something brown bobbing in it.

As he handed it to me, he said that it was a Siberian ginseng root that had been soaking for several weeks in the purest of Siberian vodka.

I took the jar from him, not really knowing what to do with it.

Boris started to talk and when he had finished Yuri chuckled and said, "Oh this is good".

I waited impatiently as Yuri tried to find the precise English words to convey what the visitor was saying.

Finally, he told me that Boris knew that the trip home would be long and tiring. He knew that Pat would be waiting to welcome me and that she would expect me to be happy to see her, and.... There was a pause while Yuri searched for words.

"This liquid will help you show Pat how much you have missed her", Yuri said with a grin.

I got the point and the three of us had a good nudge-nudge-wink-wink laugh.

Boris then told me, through Yuri, that there were two important things I must remember.

First, I should only take two spoonsful a day, one in the morning and one before bed. (and he leered). Taking more than two doses a day could lead to real problems. I suppose in today's TV parlance he was saying that if something lasts more than four hours etc etc.

The second point was that I should tell the customs officers at the Moscow airport that the ginseng was not wild but was from a farm. He explained that the demand from Korea and China for wild Siberian ginseng was so strong that poachers were stripping the Siberian woods of it.

The Russian Government had been forced to ban the export of wild ginseng.

Now, I knew that Boris was a devoted hunter who spent a lot of time in the Siberian woods and I had no doubt that the brown root floating in the vodka was wild.

I thanked Boris and he wished me a good holiday (with another leer).

I took the bottle home to my apartment and tried to figure out what to do. Should I take the jar home with me?

Leaving aside the question of whether I could benefit from a ginseng assist, my main concern was the Russian customs officers. They x-rayed all bags leaving the country and it wouldn't be hard to spot a glass jar with a metal lid.

I had had a run-in with the customs officers on a previous trip when they claimed a carpet was more than 50 years old, which it wasn't, and therefore needed a permit. (We finally gave the carpet to Yuri who always waited just outside the Customs area until he was sure that we had got through safely. Later on we found a way to get the carpet out---but that's another story.)

My main concern was that I would be held up at the check point and miss my once-a-day flight to London.

Finally, I decided to leave the ginseng in the fridge in the apartment.

It stayed there---untasted and untested---until I was packing to move back to Canada.

And then I decided to throw it out.

Looking back, I think that was a mistake.

If only I had been braver---had been prepared to defy the custom officers---I might have brought back to the West a cure for ED.

And we would have been spared a decade of TV commercials of cuddling couples heading off to the bedroom, accompanied by voice-over medical warnings.

If only....


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See you next Sunday for Posting #62 with more stories from our family’s universe! If you have comments or suggestions, please leave a comment at the bottom of this posting, or email me at johnpathunter@cs.com.