So I’m going to try and see if it works for anyone other than Hal Briston
I’ve got a cold. It sucks. The worst part of it is that I work in a bar, so my sleeping hours are totally screwed to being with. And sometimes they just get worse. I come to the point now where I sleep when I get tired and go to work around that sometimes interfering with my sleep schedule. Currently I get most of my sleep between 3PM and 8 PM. Healthy eh? Well, the other day I started to get a sore throat. I didn’t recognize this as getting sick, because normally my colds start with sneezing followed by runny nose leading to stopped nose, leading to sore throat leading to coughing, leading to coughing up mucus, leading to feeling better while still coughing up garbage for a week or so later. I had the sore throat first this time, strangely for two days before I started to feel bad. i thought it was from going out saturday when I drank a lot of gin and smoked a lot of cigarettes. But when i started to actually feel bad was the day when I had to work from 3 PM to 8PM when I’m normally asleep. I hadn’t slept that night either.
So here we are, SMBD please cure my cold if you can!
IANAD, but all I can say is you may need the standard hot chicken soup, warm blankets, and back-rub therapy regime.
I know it is an extreme treatment, and may take many days of effort of others to make you feel better.
What?
Ah, a [del]sucker[/del] test subject for my theory; I find that when I first feel the tickle of a cold coming on, I start sucking on Ricola throat lozenges (Lemon Mint is my first choice), and it doesn’t seem to develop into a cold. You can give that a try, and report back.
Since you don’t have access to the ginseng cold preparation that works wonders, what you need to do is drink lots (I finally asked my doctor what ‘drink plenty of fluids’ meant - nearly dropped when I was told ‘a glass of liquid per hour’).
Be sure you’re eating well. Take extra Vitamin C. Chicken soup has been shown to relieve symptoms. You can add garlic and cayenne if you can stand them because they help, too.
The other thing that’s worked quite well for me was to wrap myself as warmly as possible (turtleneck sweater, sweatshirt, sweatpants, socks, and usually a robe) and put extra blankets on the bed. Reasoning being if the body increases heat to kill microbes, then why make it do all the work so I heat me up. You’ll probably wake up in the middle of the night all soggy. Either stay in all your stuff (as long as you’re warm enough) or change to a new set of clothes. Don’t let yourself get chilled.
I tried this after having had a couple colds and flus and realizing that the illness usually broke and I felt better after a night where I awoke to find myself perspiring a lot. I figured that the two must be related so tried to duplicate the conditions and it sure seems to work well. I even saw an article in the last week suggesting that heat was a good treatment for colds and flu but I’m danged if I can find it again.
Hal Briston, I can add a new data point for your hypothesis. Read thread = 4:00 am snot factory. I am using a zycam chewable lozenge. It has added a distracting feeling of urpy-ness to my cold symptoms.
I’ve decided that posting on the SDMB, doesn’t get rid of your cold, it just passes it on to some other doper. I’ve got a cold and I’m pretty sure I got it from one of you guys. I did hear that you can get viruses on your computer.
Cocaine was the original cold medicine. I discovered in my wilder days that it still works just as well as it did in the early 20th century. Not that I’d suggest such a thing–great as it may be for coughs, it’s terrible for sniffles.
Well I posted this on a Tuesday night. Here’s my history…I went out on Saturday night. I drank a martini, and the next day ended up with a sore throat. I thought this was from the gin, but actually was a cold coming on. Monday is when I first felt lack of energy. So Tuesday I was doing the cold thing, plenty of fluids. chicken soup, etc. And Wednesday I was relatively fine. I even went out for a few beers and on thursday I was totally fine.
My doctor recommended chicken soup for sinus trouble. He said it’s not just because he’s Jewish; a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine said it works.
If you have a sore throat, and you don’t have time to be sick, Chloraseptic will numb your gullet. It will also make everything taste like that overpowering cherry stuff. A cherry pizza is not so great, but it won’t hurt to swallow it.
The zinc-y lozenges have actually shown well in some tests. I tried it myself, but it tastes really dreadful, and nothing you can eat or drink will cover it. I’d rather be sick.:eek:
Cepacol is fantastic for sore throats. I think it’s actually a lidocaine (or something similar) lozenge, so it just numbs your throat. Definitely go with Honey-Lemon–the other flavors are horribly nasty, whereas that one is at least tolerable.
I hate the Chloraseptic spray - it would work great if it actually hit my throat, but all I ever got out of it was a numb tongue, and I don’t particularly like a numb tongue.
I have heard of Shower Soothers, never tried them but maybe I will. They have news ones that are vanilla mint. Not sure if they work, they now have vanilla mint.
