[arkey]

Interesting, you're describing exactly what I went through a few years ago.

In my case, however, I turned to pure ginger infusions, following the advice of a herbalist. Haven't gone through it again so far, plus it also works great for colds and flu.

[merksoftworks]

So, gingerol is anti inflammatory. Fun fact, so is allicin, which is produced by garlic. You get a lot of medicine that looks quite a bit like quack medicine - for instance people making garlic extract: https://www.allicin-c.com/?AFFID=549212

But then you end up with peer reviewed studies which indicate some anti-viral properties of garlic: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7434784/

[arkey]

> You get a lot of medicine that looks quite a bit like quack medicine

It depends what you understand by "quack medicine".

To me, in the beginning, all the stuff about drinking weird plants and doing homemade remedies did sound a bit quacky. But that was because of my absolute ignorance.

People have been using these remedies for thousands of years based on a deeper knowledge of nature than your random dude has, but we've fallen into a scam where we are made to feel that anything not made in a lab and costing a certain amount of money is nonsense.

Garlic, onion, ginger, turmeric, honey, echinacea, raspberry... those are natural wonders for basic natural medicine.