My kid gave me yet another in a seemingly endless series of colds about 2 weeks ago. I saw a commercial for something called Zicam, which claimed to reduce the severity of colds, so (being a good little consumer) I ran out and got some. The active ingredient is something called Zincum Gluconium, in a thick gel which resembles nothing so much as a gelid clump of snot.
It seems to have worked for me, in that this cold didn’t seem to be as severe as previous colds. My wife thinks I’m delusional. I’m wondering if this stuff actually works as advertised, or if the apparent shortness of the cold is due to either random coincidence or perhaps a psychosomatic effect.
Probably a combination of coincidence, psychosomatic effect, and actual effacy.
Apparently Zinc helps shorten the duration and severity of colds. I remember seeing a few articles to that effect over the past few years, with various degrees of credibility. There are a number of Zinc lozenges available for this reason. ‘Zincum Gluconium’ sounds like ‘Zinc Boogers’ to me, my guess is that it’s in that form so that it can be quickly absorbed by the capillaries in your nose or something.
A quick search reveals that “Zincum Gluconium” isn’t really an active ingredient, but the company’s name for its patented ‘delivery system’ of zinc gluconate.
There is newer data than that. Someone who believed in it formulated Zinc into a gel to be put directly into the nose, then commissioned a study at a university which was larger than any of the studies Cecil talked about, and it showed a statistically significant reduction in cold duration.
Now normally, this would be considered one data point, and in order to market it as a medication, the company would have to conduct more studies showing that it’s both safe and effective, and eventually the FDA would let them sell it. Or, they could just sell it as a “supplement” called Zincum Gluconium, and not make any claims about its effectiveness, or even its intended use - the would have to let word of mouth take care of that.
But, there is a gigantic quack loophole in our law, when something is declared as homeopathic by a group that certifies those things. They somehow showed to the homeopathic certification committee (read: “quack committee”) that this zinc compound could cause sniffles in healthy adults, then it was declared to be part of the homeopathic pharmacopia. At this point, they can market it however they want, and the FDA can’t touch them because our laws don’t allow the FDA to regulate homeopathic stuff.
Zicam uses a 1% dilution of the stuff, but instead of saying that, they adopt the homeopathic mumbo-jumbo and call it “2X”.
So the stuff might be effective, but I won’t buy it simply because they’re being unethical in their marketing of it.
I know nothing about zicam in particular, but for about 6 years, I’ve been taking zinc (Cold-Eeze brand) in large quantities, the MOMENT I feel sickness come on. I haven’t had a severe cold since. I take one lozenge every 2 or 3 hours, about 6 a day for 2 or 3 days, and that’s it. Can’t of course state as fact that A prevents B, but I’m convinced enough that I’ll keep doing it every time I start to get sick…