Perhaps you, like me, suffer from occasional sinus headaches, maybe because of seasonal allergies, maybe because of household dust or HVAC systems or pixie dust or whatever. (Franklin Roosevelt blamed air conditioning for his allergy problems, I hear, but I'm not giving that up.)
Popular medications for these painful headaches include completely useless nostrums like acetaminophen and almost completely useless nostrums like phenylephrine. The only things I find useful are solid doses of ibuprofen mixed with pseudoephedrine, and I am willing to wait at the pharmacy counter to get the latter. Sinus headaches are a grizzly.
Are there any natural treatments one might try? Well, there's this:
Ginger beer, a nonalcoholic beverage (and a favorite of the Fourth Doctor), has a lot more ginger sting to it than ginger ale. The first time I ever drank it, I got a bottle of Old Tyme brand ginger beer, and it burned my throat like crazy. I was a tot, and I had never felt a soda do that before. But, according to a former coworker of Mrs. Key's of Caribbean descent, that burn makes it a super cure for sinus woes.
Thing is, you can usually only get Old Tyme sodas closer to Manhattan. And the ones I've tried up here, like Jamaican Choice (above) and Goya just do not have the same kick 'n burn. Unless my taste buds have toughened up over the years, in which case Old Tyme's ginger beer might also be too wimpy. They all have some burn to them; I just remember the Old Tyme one being almost undrinkable.
I had saved the above ginger beer for my next sinus headache, and I drank it with a Buffalo chicken sandwich with chipotle mayo. All that zing should have cut through the wall of snot and started some drainage, right? And to an extent it did. I did feel better after lunch.
An hour later it was back, and I had to take ibuprofen and pseudoephedrine. I'm telling you, that drug combo works like a charm.
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