Dr. Schmidt explains the world: In the past, you had to suck up salt water from small bowls

It’s cold season. Inhaling with salt water is said to be very good. Why actually?

When the mucous membranes from the nose to the bronchi swell due to inflammation, mucus production is part of our first defense. And to keep the mucous membranes moist, salt water is a good idea. If you have to do a lot of work in dry air, it is also a good idea to rinse your nose with salt water.

To do this you use this disgusting thing that you have to hold under your nostril.

The nasal shower. But that’s actually practical. Compared to before, when you had to suck it up from a bowl with your nose… Today it’s very easy. Runs in one nostril and out the other – and that’s it.

But you feel like your brain is being flushed out.

Real? Well, maybe it’s not a bad idea to rinse your brain.

Back to the nose. Does a cold go away faster by the sea?

It’s certainly better by the sea. However, sea air is more recommended for people with chronic respiratory diseases. Of course, historically there are other methods as well. I remember my mother, who had severe asthma as a teenager, and was furious that she wasn’t sent to Heligoland for treatment, but only to Bad Kösen, where she had to go for a walk every day past the so-called graduation towers.

Okay, what is that?

The graduation towers are now at most a technical monument or an architectural monument. These are relatively high walls made of wood, erected outdoors, to which branches of bushes are attached and where the salt water is pumped up from deep in the earth and then trickles down from the top of these bushes. Some of the water evaporates. This was originally part of the salt production technology in order to get a pre-concentration of the salt solution in our areas, which are somewhat less sunny, so that not so much heating material would be burned when it was boiled down during salt production. The air is a little saltier near the graduation towers. And at some point this was discovered as a spa idea.

And you had to walk along that wall – I understand your mother.

It’s just not the same as being at the sea. At the sea you have this almost all the time. And of course it’s a bit more varied. On the other hand, the sea climate is a slightly stronger stimulus for the respiratory system. Which is why it is better for some asthmatics in the high mountains, where at certain altitudes there are only a few natural allergens.

Above all, we eat salt. Karl Lauterbach sounds like it’s poison.

Well, it’s not quite that clear. The amount should not exceed five or six grams a day, otherwise it becomes uncomfortable. We need salt, so to be precise, table salt, NaCl, i.e. sodium chloride, the main component of what we use as rock salt for cooking. The composition of Dead Sea salt is a little different. We need salt because it is an essential part of our body fluids. How stupid this is, if it weren’t with salt, you would realize if you did this nasal douche with plain tap water. That would dry out your nose. Because then the salt from the mucous membrane cells would diffuse into the rinse water due to the osmotic pressure and flow out of our body. If you’ve lost your temper, you’ve had a circulatory collapse or something like that, which I’ve had once or twice…

Smelling salts!?

No, we’re not talking about smelling salts. When I woke up in the hospital, there was a bag of saline solution hanging on a rack next to me. This meant that everything got back on track to some extent.