I seem to be running into a lot of people who have a “knockout” theory on getting sick. The idea is something like this:
1.) The moment you start feeling symptoms, the illness hasn’t really taken hold yet and your body is for lack of a better word in a “skirmish” stage.
2.) By timely ingestion of some variant of treatment, you give your immune system a quick boost to attack the germs/bacteria/whatever. This treatment ranges from vitamins to echinacea to goldenseal to zinc to normal cough/flu medicine.
3.) Your body wins, and you don’t go full-blown.
I’m concerned mostly with common illnesses here, cold, flu, whatever random bacteria or virus that sick days are designed for.
Also, I’m less concerned about the specific treatment (vitamins, zicam, etc) then if the idea itself has any evidence - that there is a window in time on an illness where you feel symptoms AND can put a quick stop to it.
And taking it one step further - I imagine most of these illnesses have incubation periods. Is it feasible a person could be in incubation stage, feel NO symptoms, and take any treatment to prevent getting sick? (How this would actually be monitored/verified without lab work, I can’t say).
Well, that pretty much describes how tamiflu works against flu. I have heard claims that zinc or vitamin C can do the same for colds, but I have seen no evidence of it in my own case. In the case of rabies, the virus takes months usually to get to the brain where it does the damage and you can in the meantime get a full course of vaccine.
The difference is Tamiflu is actually attacking the virus while zinc or vitamin C will only boost the immune system.
Interestingly enough, I was reading in the Virus Hunters, if they could figure out when exactly you were infected with something like Lassa Fever or Ebola they can take your antibody count and within two or three days figure out how severe the disease will be by how quickly your immune system is fighting it.
When an upper respiratory infecton tries to colonize me, it first goes for the nasal passages, which gunk up and drip disgusting stuff down the back of my throat, eventually making for a severely painful throat whereby swallowing feels like glass shards and barbed wire, and then the gunk, which is dripping on down, gets into the upper bronchial tubes and by that time has generated the “please let me die now” phase of misery. Body eventually fights back and I feel better but start coughing the gunk back up, usually lose my voice for 3-4 days then continue coughing for what seems like forever, gradually trailing off. (Yeah, TMI, I know).
Anyway, yes, I can sense when the nasty critters are moving in on my nose, and I hook up my WaterPik and plug in the nasal irrigator adapter and run slightly hypertonic saline up one nostril and out the other and rinse the gunk out. Repeat often. It usually completely prevents the sore throat, and prevents the worsening trend towards “let me die”, and it never gets a real toehold; I start coughing it back up sooner, doesn’t last anywhere near as long, don’t get the laryngitis, never have to take to bed and declare myself “sick”, etc.
I think the method is right, but the reasoning is wrong. The symptoms of a cold seem to be a sort of sequence of events. For example, mucous drips into your throat and leads to a longer-lasting sore throat. Getting rid of the mucous or decreasing mucous production means you’ll have less of a sore throat, but it has nothing to do with boosting your immune system or “fighting the infection”.
I don’t know if there’s a scientific answer, but it sure seems to me that occasionally I avoid the worst of a common cold sometimes by resting as much as possible – all day and all night if I can, taking lots and lots of fluids, especially things like soup, broth and fruit juice. Of course it’s also possible that the incipient illness would have gone away anyway, but short of getting an instant clone that did not engage in those practices we may never know.
I assumed that the mucus-drip was at least in part a transportation vehicle for carrying lotsa virus downstream, but I guess that’s probably not the important part. The experience of sickness is the experience of the symptoms, and stopping the sore throat and the accumulation of upper bronchial gunk means fewer symptoms.
I used to get colds that would start off with light symptoms, and then I’d always have an illness. Now when I take lots of vit-C, it always goes away and I never have a full blown illness. (Wow, I sound like a commercial testimonial.) But honestly, I think the last time I had a full cold that lasted more than light symptoms for a day was over a year ago. I do find myself sometimes getting tired or sniffly or scratchy but then after all the fluids/vit-C, after a day or two, I’m completely normal again.
This happens to me too, and when I feel even the slightest discomfort, I try to “knock it out.”
And I have to say, it works. I haven’t had a full-blown cold in years. I take a lot of vitamin C, garlic and–what I think really helps–I gargle with hot water and drink lots of hot tea.
So I have no idea if it’s about immunity or it’s that the temperature change in the throat hinders the spread of the virus–or even if it’s just psychological. But it seems to work.
I used to get colds that would start with light symptoms and then I’d get sick. Now, I get light symptoms, do absolutely nothing at all, and it goes away and I never have a full-blown illness.
Of course, that’s not a scientific answer either but I figured I’d just try to even up the anecdotes.
Tamiflu (Oseltamivir) certainly qualifies, thanks for the mention. It seems targeted specifically at the flu, and is prescription only - that’s slightly different then what I am dealing with, but still good to know.
Forgive me for staying skeptical, but it is this exact type of testimonial that made me post here in the first place. How do you know it isn’t a case of the placebo effect? How do you know you were really about to fall ill, instead of just feeling a little off (in other words, that you would have been fine, vitamin-c or not)? Did your immune system really need a ‘boost’ or would it have done the job just fine, anyway? Going a year or three between illnesses seems perfectly possible, even without preventative methods.
I’ve noticed that every so often I feel like I’m coming down with a cold (with the telltale feelings in the nasal cavity, lips, and tongue), but I fight it off before it can get any worse. I joke that weak strains of the common cold thrive on university campuses because most students’ immune systems are taxed by sleep deprivation and excessive alcohol consumption; I get plenty of sleep, so I easily fend off the infection. I do not need to take vitamin pills or herbal supplements to fend off a cold like this. They probably don’t help you, either.
What does this phrase even mean? Your immune system’s response is basically inflammation, so if you’re taking something that increases inflammation it’s probably not a good idea.
As for anecdotes, I have one. At the first sign of a cold, I strictly avoid taking any kind of supplements, and I haven’t had a cold in years. Of course, I strictly avoid supplements at all times so that probably helps too. Cause and effect dontchaknow.
I don’t, but the thing is I used to get sick a few times a year. Now it never takes a hold. The colds never longer than maybe a day or two. Or even if I do feel sick I rarely have a stuffy nose or a cough. The only thing that’s changed is the vit-C. I mean, it could be placebo effect, but I’d expect for that to only work sometimes–wouldn’t the illness just take a hold and I’d be sick at least sometimes if it wasn’t working?
the drip irritates the throat, making it sore, combined with the hacking to clear lungs …
Interdict the drip and the hacking, reduces the pain.
I hit myself with mucinex/guaifenesin and tons of liquids and nasonex the instant i get that first tickle before I notice the drip. If I hit it on the exact dosages and times, and do not stop I evade the sore throat and plugged nose. I still have the bug, but the symptoms are reduced. If I miss timing or dosage, i get the full brunt o fit.
The vitamin C isn’t the only thing that’s changed. Your body has been exposed to more colds, and has manufactured more antibodies. Maybe they’re helping you fend off new (similar) infections while the vitamin C does nothing.
I suppose a double-blind experiment on this subject would be useful. I’d be a little surprised to learn that one hasn’t already been conducted.
My Dad was once in the skirmish stage of a cold. At work, one night, he passed the chlorine injectors and was inhaling just at they misfired and sent out a cloud of chlorine gas. He said it burned all the way down to his lungs and left him with an almost irresistable urge to cough.
But he had been warned that, in the case of a chlorine accident, coughing was a bad thing. It could damage his throat and would make recovering harder and longer. So he concentrated on breathing in and out slowly and not coughing - not coughing. He worked his way slowly to the lunch room and tried to tell the other workers what had happened, but he couldn’t talk.
One guessed what it was, though, and said “I know what you need.” He got him a glass of milk to drink. Dad said that was the purest sense of relief that he ever felt in his life. It didn’t fix things completely, but it took away that damned urge to cough and let him breathe.
Anyway, the chlorine killed the cold dead. Completely knocked it out. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else, though. Chlorine is nasty.
If I feel that tickly feeling in my throat that signals an impending sore throat, and I go and gargle with warm salty water several times, that often seems to kill whatever’s colonizing my throat and causing the symptom. YMMV, of course, but it’s one of those cheap, old-timey remedies that does always work for me.
Colds used to kick my ass. They’d move in, set up shop, and hang around for weeks. Then, later in college, one of my best friends handed me some Airborne when he noticed I was coming down with one. I wasn’t expecting anything to happen, but wham, bam, the cold was out the door in a couple of days instead of a couple of weeks. Since then, I load up on the stuff anytime I feel a cold coming on, and my colds consistently stay down to a few days of mild symptoms. The stuff is cheap enough that I don’t feel like not taking it when I get my next cold, just in the interest of seeing whether or not the cold goes back to the old M.O.
