The Best PLACEBO You Will Ever Drink
This is the Excalibur of placebos. You should try it.
Whenever I'm beginning to feel rundown and sick, I mind slay myself with this beverage. The sheer psychological force of its flavors is enough to gaslight me into thinking I'm feeling better.
common-cold killing placebo recipe
Nuance. When it comes to the beverage, you should do what's right for you. Add and subtract to your heart's content. I find these tricks help.
1. Break the cinnamon apart, pull the anise into small pedals, and cut the ginger into cubes. More edge = more flavor. 2. If you use ingredients purchased at a typical american grocery store, this will be expensive. Try sourcing from an asian grocery store. The anise and cinnamon are usually much cheaper and of better quality.
The Big Three: Ginger, Star Anise, Cinnamon
3. If you're in the unenviable position of having to be out in public while snotting and sneezing like a toddler, it's worth going down to TJ Maxx and grabbing a couple seasoning holders. Pack the ginger, anise, and cinnamon in them and drop the spice holders into a heat-rated thermos with the lemon juice, moringa, and cayenne. Then add hot water throughout the day.
An obligatory attempt to drown you in my life story. You ever meet someone who could duck a cold? They get "sick" and barely feel it. Life goes on uninterrupted. No big deal. That's not me. When I feel that tickle in my throat, I start clearing the next week off my calendar. I've tried everything: supplements, preemptive medication, diet, starvation, cardio. None of it ever worked.
The year I worked at the mall, I got smoked. RSV, a cold, and COVID-19 all within the span of eight months. Call me soft, but something about the general public breathing on me nonstop for forty hours a week during the throes of the holiday season revealed the shoddy state of my immune system.
The leaves turned, the weather got cold, and all of a sudden the sniffs and coughs started coming out of the woodwork. "Great," I thought. "Here we go again." But it was soup season and for whatever reason I got it in my head that I should start making pho broth at home. I had all the ingredients handy when I got sick. Feeling adventurous in a desperate way, I poached some of my precious pho mixings and made them into a tea. Then I dumped in some moringa and cayenne for kicks. Guess what? It worked.
Monetizing public health. Wait, shouldn't I be trying to get rich off of this? As much as I would like to ensconce myself in a number of supply chain and marketing problems over the next years just so a major retailer can snake my idea, that sounds less than fulfilling. What I really want in my heart of hearts is for people to stop going out in public when they're sick and for the consequences of that behavior to be less catastrophic on my day to day life. I hereby consecrate this open-source health tool in the name of Saint Jean-Baptiste Kempf.
That said. If you find the profit-motive especially significant or have a particularly moving experience with this recipe, you're invited to buy me a coffee. Rather, buy me ingredients for another batch of my magnificent placebo drink.