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Sooo I did in fact have a very merry Christmas except that I spent it prone in a recliner moaning because I do not suffer headcolds well. I am going to post a run-down of things that I do that are sometimes effective for colds as penance for being contagious at my loved ones. (In fairness I offered to stay home and the consensus was that people don't get quarantined from Christmas for headcolds. I am not 100% sure that the level of sadness I would have experienced missing Christmas is actually greater than the level of sadness five people are probably going to experience in the next two weeks when they have horrible headcolds :( but in fairness my mother and the two siblings that look like her don't get appreciably sick when they have colds.) I think I already posted this once but I'm revising it, I guess.
1. Zinc lozenges at first sign of sore, scratchy throat. (About half of recent reputable studies found that zinc lozenges taken every second waking hour from start to resolution of cold symptoms decreased the total duration of the cold. That amount of zinc makes my stomach hurt, so I tend to focus on front-loading the zinc in the first, sore-throat day when the lozenge has at least a palliative effect on the throat.
2. Echinacea tea with honey and lemon. The evidence isn't terrible for the actual efficacy of echinacea in reducing the duration of the common cold. Subjective evidence, as well as a humorous study, is that drinking hot things that taste nice cheers people right up. Personal evidence is that having a little project to do at intervals when I'm sick gives me something to do besides sulk, and that making tea is about the cognitive speed I want to operate at when aforesaid sickness is happening.
3. No antihistamines besides actual honest-to-god psuedoephedrine. It's good to see a large metastudy confirm what I have always suspected: decongestants don't do much (besides, in my case, make me horribly dizzy and sleepy), and Sudafed (which is technically in the antihistamine, not the decongestant, class) does very little, but it does help a little bit and does not make me horribly dizzy and sleepy. I take ibuprofen separately to handle muscle aches and headaches.
4. Using a neti pot: while it can get pretty disgusting, it turns out that washing the goo out of your nose with salt water decreases the amount of goo in your nose. During the high-goo phase of a cold, using a neti pot three-ish times a day (more than recommended, incidentally, in the thing I just linked to) can bring me intervals of blessed, blessed relief, which I certainly never got from Dayquil.
5. I'm afraid I can't follow the science on this one, but my anecdotal understanding that the end-of-cold emotional funk is actually a symptom of my immune system kicking in continues to help, and to help me make good decisions for self-care. Luckily so far I can say that in my case this symptom goes away in about a week. (You can find some of the stuff I can't follow well by searching for "cytokine mood" in Google scholar.)
In general, the key seems to be to find essentially harmless things to do that increase my comfort and give me something to do in between whining and naps. While this is a list of things I personally find helpful, not medical advice, it seems wise to say that if any cold/flu symptoms, including illness-related depression, are carrying on for weeks and weeks it seems wise to see a doctor. I totally dragged on with a cough for two months in high school when I really should have been on antibiotics for a chest infection.
1. Zinc lozenges at first sign of sore, scratchy throat. (About half of recent reputable studies found that zinc lozenges taken every second waking hour from start to resolution of cold symptoms decreased the total duration of the cold. That amount of zinc makes my stomach hurt, so I tend to focus on front-loading the zinc in the first, sore-throat day when the lozenge has at least a palliative effect on the throat.
2. Echinacea tea with honey and lemon. The evidence isn't terrible for the actual efficacy of echinacea in reducing the duration of the common cold. Subjective evidence, as well as a humorous study, is that drinking hot things that taste nice cheers people right up. Personal evidence is that having a little project to do at intervals when I'm sick gives me something to do besides sulk, and that making tea is about the cognitive speed I want to operate at when aforesaid sickness is happening.
3. No antihistamines besides actual honest-to-god psuedoephedrine. It's good to see a large metastudy confirm what I have always suspected: decongestants don't do much (besides, in my case, make me horribly dizzy and sleepy), and Sudafed (which is technically in the antihistamine, not the decongestant, class) does very little, but it does help a little bit and does not make me horribly dizzy and sleepy. I take ibuprofen separately to handle muscle aches and headaches.
4. Using a neti pot: while it can get pretty disgusting, it turns out that washing the goo out of your nose with salt water decreases the amount of goo in your nose. During the high-goo phase of a cold, using a neti pot three-ish times a day (more than recommended, incidentally, in the thing I just linked to) can bring me intervals of blessed, blessed relief, which I certainly never got from Dayquil.
5. I'm afraid I can't follow the science on this one, but my anecdotal understanding that the end-of-cold emotional funk is actually a symptom of my immune system kicking in continues to help, and to help me make good decisions for self-care. Luckily so far I can say that in my case this symptom goes away in about a week. (You can find some of the stuff I can't follow well by searching for "cytokine mood" in Google scholar.)
In general, the key seems to be to find essentially harmless things to do that increase my comfort and give me something to do in between whining and naps. While this is a list of things I personally find helpful, not medical advice, it seems wise to say that if any cold/flu symptoms, including illness-related depression, are carrying on for weeks and weeks it seems wise to see a doctor. I totally dragged on with a cough for two months in high school when I really should have been on antibiotics for a chest infection.
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And I always burn my tongue on the tea because I'm not a big tea-drinker when I'm not sick and forget how long I have to wait. You'd think there would be something without side effects in this world.
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SO TRUE.
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