This weekend, I woke up with a cold. My body ached, my nose was stuffy, and I felt weak and miserable.
Now, the American thing to do is to think about where I picked up the germ, so I thought back over the last few days. There was the plane trip, of course, as well as the young woman in Customer Service the other day who coughed on my receipt. We Americans are all about disease transmission. But the German thing to do is to think about when I got chilled. Getting chilled is a fact of life in this land of changeable wet weather, and I got chilled on Thursday afternoon when I took a brisk walk and came home with cold feet and a runny nose. Many Americans are scornful of this idea, but research does appear to show that if cold germs are already present in your system, becoming chilled can cause a mild asymptomatic infection to develop into the Real Thing.
I went down to the Apotheke and picked up the cold remedy pictured above because it contains elderberry extract. Europeans have been using elderberry against colds for thousands of years, as we all know from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Elder-Tree Mother,” possibly the first description of a drug trip in children’s literature. Medical studies have found that elderberry extract contains a powerful antiviral agent that can cure the flu within a couple of days. So I took my elderberry remedy, and I drank hot elderberry tea, and I ate elderberry jam on my toast, too, just to make sure. Elderberry jam tastes like a cross between blueberries and dark sweet cherries.
It’s Monday morning. After two days of feeling awful, I’m completely symptom-free. So I don’t laugh at old wives’ tales. There’s a reason those wives lived to be old!