Treating your baby’s fever and acute symptoms at home is easy enough. The goal of treatment is to encourage healing and stimulate a strong immune response. Reducing the fever is not the goal, as the fever will do what is necessary to fight the illness. Natural remedies will encourage the fight.

The first and easiest remedy to try is homeopathic Belladonna. The classical indications for Belladonna are fever with sudden onset, radiating heat, and flushing and redness of the skin. There may be redness (indicating inflammation) at some specific location in the body: in the throat, the ears, the eyes, the skin—pretty much anywhere. Older children will complain of a headache. Babies who need Belladonna are often quiet and subdued, moaning and very hot to touch. Or they may be crying with discomfort. Belladonna is indicated before significant discharge develops with a cold or other symptoms appear later in an illness that would point the way to another remedy.

If babies are very uncomfortable and screaming in apparent pain, then you may want to try giving homeopathic Chamomilla. Often one dose will calm your baby and allow her to get back to sleep.

Giving herbs for immune-system support is always indicated. Echinacea and black elderberry are usually well tolerated by babies, and children’s liquid extract preparations are available at most health-food stores. Yin Chao Junior (Health Concerns) is a Chinese herbal formula available through any licensed health care practitioner and is indicated for the first stage of an illness. Yin Chao is a formula developed in 1798 to disperse Wind Heat and relieve Heat in acute illness caused by external pathogens. Windbreaker (Chinese Medicine Works) is a pediatric formula with similar therapeutic effect that also clears Phlegm.

Sponging babies off with a cool cloth may momentarily relieve discomfort as the water evaporates from the skin. But sponging does not reduce fevers because the body’s thermostat is unaffected by external manipulation of the temperature. Never put alcohol on a baby to accomplish this, as it will be absorbed through the skin.

excerpt from The Holistic Baby Guide: Alternative Care for Common Health Problems by Randall Neustaetder OMD