No cure so you gotta rest. Nose is stuffed so you gotta mouth breathe. Throat is dry from mouth breathing. Dry throat makes it painful to swallow. Pain keeps you from sleeping and recovering. Lack of sleep leads to worse symptoms like piercing headaches. Need to rest to get rid of the headaches. Headache and swallowing is too painful to rest properly. Lack of rest perpetuates headaches, nose congestion, dry throat, painful swallowing.
What is this BS
I’ll admit I’m a sample size of one with no counterfactual, but I started using Vicks First Defence about 4 years ago and in that time the few colds I’ve had were much briefer and milder than they were previously.
It’s a kind of mega-mucus spray that performs the same mechanical action as snot to physically get the virus out of your body, only a lot more aggressively. It’s briefly unpleasant to use but usually worth it. (I am not paid by Vicks)
its worst if you allergies , or ashtma. humans are somewhat brachycephalic, so we are prone to breathing issues, or nasal disruptions. you know dogs with this type of conditions have a whole host of breathing and other issues.
getting flu and covid, rsv, or another viral infection is much worst than a cold.
are you sure this isnt covid, the current one causes severe sore throat, and painful swallowing. i just went through nimbus variant like 2 weeks ago and this what it caused. cold almost never causes this.
it sounds more like COVID.
I find the over the counter cold meds at least handle the congestion pretty dang well. A few hot baths a day for sickness body pain/joint inflammation. I don’t get headaches so the worst part is the throat for me usually. Cough syrup or the drops are useless I find.
Those symptoms you’ve described? It’s your immune system doing that to you. On purpose, not a mistake. Nose is stuffed because you’re producing extra mucous to flush infection out of your airways. Dry throat because the tissues are inflamed to directly kill viruses using the body’s transport system. Yeah, it’s bad for you - but it’s worse for the little invaders.
Yes, I know it’s the natural defences popping off but I’m saying I’m having a hard time keeping this plane in the sky when my copilot keeps slapping me with a hot seafood entrée. Y’know??
It’s rough but the other option is death. The cold would kill you if your immune system wasn’t doing this to you.
It’s a good argument against the intelligent design theory, isn’t it?
I was originally going to include “what part of this is intelligent design?!?!” In the post but I didn’t want it to devolve into a religious debate. But seriously, how intelligent is our design when our defense mechanism makes recovery even more difficult to achieve?
Like some asshole is out there designing a vehicle that runs on solar but you’re also only allowed to drive it when the sun is down.
Because evolution isn’t intelligent and humans have been able to keep reproducing despite getting fucked up every now and then by our own body trying to fight off colds.
I’ll say from personal experience, I found out that my body is actually awesome at responding to colds - I just don’t let it.
Storytime - for pretty much all my life, I’ve had what I considered a pretty normal and functioning immune system. I would get a cold, feel how you felt for a few days or weeks, mostly just power through, and then I’d be back to normal.
However, in college I took 6 months off to hike the Appalachian Trail. This was great for a lot of reasons, but one thing I noticed (which everyone around me agreed on when I mentioned it to them), is that I’d pretty much stopped getting colds. For reference, trail life is not at all sanitary. Daily showers and grooming are the stuff of fantasy. Washing your hands after you take a shit is rare. If you frequent the small lean-to shelters along the trail to sleep (as I did almost every night), you will be sleeping shoulder to shoulder with other hikers with similar levels of hygiene. And it’s not like we are somehow not catching and transmitting pathogens to each other. Every year, things like the flu or norovirus will rip through the hiking community, leaving 100 mile stretches of trail where you’ll walk past dozens of hikers groaning in their tents (haphazardly set up just feet from the trail), with a pool of vomit just outside.
But the whole time I was on the trail, I never got a cold. As long as I wasn’t sick sick, I felt very generally healthy. Why?
Well, the life I was living was very different than my normal life. I think I am decently healthy in my normal life. I eat a healthy diet and exercise regularly. But on the trail, I had a lot more things going for me.
- I slept a lot, in sync with my circadian rhythm. 8pm was widely agreed to be “hiker’s midnight”, since about 15 minutes after the sun went down, all the hikers would start feeling sleepy and decide to go to bed. I would usually knock out instantly, and then wake up at first light, groggily peer out my tent at the coming morning, take a piss, then roll back over and sleep for another hour or two.
- I was getting a lot of exercise. This exercise was rarely particularly strenuous, but every day I would wake up, shoulder my pack, and walk about 15 miles.
- I had a phone, but had no backup battery bank, mini solar charger, or anything like that. Cell reception in the hills typically oscillated between bad and nonexistant. So my phone almost universally lived in the bottom of a stuff sack inside my backpack. I would take it out maybe once every couple days to listen to a song or two before turning it off again to conserve prescious battery life in case of emergency. Partly this helped because it meant that I wasn’t staring at a bright phone screen when I should be sleeping. But more than that, I think it helped because I wasn’t constantly feeding my brain a stream of nee content. I spent almost my entire day, every day, hiking in the forest in silence with no distractions. All I had to entertain myself was noticing the environment around me, occassionally checking my map and digital watch to calculate how far to the next stream/shelter/trail junction/town, and whatever thoughts came up in my head.
- I spent pretty much all my time breathing fresh air. Most of the time I was in rural land with very little air pollution, and even when I did approach population centers, they tended to be, at most, medium-sized towns.
- When I wasn’t hiking or camping alone, I was hiking and camping with other hikers. Trail life tends to dissolve the differences in class, age, national origin, political affiliation, religion, or anything else. Everyone shares a common interest - life on the trail - so conversation tends to flow easily. Trail talk tends to center around things hikers think about - food, water, miles, towns, shelters, gear, other hikers, weather, poop. Outside the rare individual who gives off bad vibes, everyone is welcome and welcoming, creating a general sense of community and support.
- I had a well defined goal, obvious steps to take to achieve it, and made progress every day. The goal: walk to the northern terminus. The plan: wake up, break camp, walk. Every day, I could lay down in bed and look at my map, celebrating the progress I’d made, seeing how much closer I was to some landmark like a town, a mountaintop vista, or a significant mile marker. With a clear goal like this and few other distractions, my sense of time dialated significantly - the present moment became paramount. The next few and previous few miles were all that mattered. Yesterday and tomorrow were significant markers in my mind. But the town I was in 3 days ago, I felt I hadn’t seen in years. And when I started the trail? What I would do when I finished? That was another lifetime.
All these things, I think, contributed to my physical and mental health. And doing so, they either (a) improved my immune system enough that the common cold was stamped out long before my body had to create congestion to deal with it, or (b) my immune system wasn’t overreacting to a relatively minor threat, and was simply taking care of these minor viral infections in the background without bothering me
Probably worth mentioning, that the benefits of this can be reaped in part just by being and walking in nature every day. Especially on the mental health side, in some places of the world, I think it’s a general concept called “forest bathing” or similar.
I’ve never done a hike longer than 100km, which means I’ve never been on the trail for more than a few days at a time.
However, I’ve noticed the same effects ever since I started doing that more frequently. I’m much less prone to falling properly sick than any of my friends or family, whenever my partner falls ill, I typically go through a mild similar thing in a few days time, but often survive without even fever, when they can be bedridden for weeks, even. I might get some signs of a flu or whatever, but so much milder. It’s not unusual that I just entirely skip being sick at all, even mild symptoms, even if my entire household is struggling in bed with fever. And I tend to be the caretaker then, so ample opportunity for the bugs to pass on to me, constantly.
And every time I realize I’m falling unusually sick, I realize that it’s been some months since my last hike.
And if I just keep doing a hike or two biannually and otherwise visit the forests or the lakes or whatever at least once a week, even if just briefly due to stress and work and all, I am so much less prone to proper sickness, but having any sickness at all in general too!
So this is mostly for those who read the OP I’m responding to and thinking, it’d be nice to afford 6 months of a vacation — you need not! It works, even if this is just an anecdote, with fewer efforts and much more casual execution too! And it has been studied a lot, although take it with a grain of salt because I haven’t stored any of the studies/papers of the abstracts I’ve read just passing by thanks to my adhd curiousness.
I think the consensus is, nevertheless, that there are provable, observable benefits of being in nature, even if just a bit at a time, even if not all that frequently. But I’m not a researcher or work in these kinds of fields, so just be wary that I might be overselling or even misrepresenting it. But I feel fairly confident in saying so.
Is there a Best of Lemmy? This should definitely be on there. Kudos.
Thank you for sharing this! A good read.
Loved reading this. I found exactly the same on the long hikes I’ve done. Havent done Apalachian trail, but have done The Camino, Francigena, Kumano Kodo.
Eating a toe of raw garlic is about the only real remedy. Because it’s slime covers the throat and some ingredients suport the body in defending. Lime blossom (? Lindenblüten) tea has a similiar effect but less potent and accelerates the metabolism (i.e. you get hot) instead.
I’ve heard garlic has anti bacterial properties, does this actually work? I’ll eat a whole bulb of garlic, I don’t care.
this sounds alot like nimbus variant, covid than a cold. i had it recently and i had the symptoms you described, the painful sore throat, swallowing, the headaches though not a s severe as yours. bronchitis as well.
a cold causes alot of sneezing, and a mild sore throat at most, plus congestion in the nasal area. it almost never causes painful sore throat, and the coughing /bronchitis usually occurs after the fever, and when the cold resolves.
with covid you coughing/bronchitis right form the start of the fever. i couldnt swallow food or water for a few days, but i was hacking/coughing thick sputum for that long.
Ugh I hope it isn’t covid. I don’t have time for that. My throat doesn’t hurt when I drink or eat, it’s just painful when I’m trying to sleep because it gets so dry. The headache lasted about 4 days but I’ve had a few episodes of cluster headaches in the past that felt the same. Same spot on my head and frequency so I wrote it off as stress and lack of sleep triggering it. Almost no sneezing, mild cough with clear mucus. Night sweats the last couple days but it’s been 6 days already so hopefully I’ve gotten through most of it. I think you’re right though, it seems worse than just a cold.
For me, it does. It’s a case of woah and then i’ve read up the why. But really chew it good (nose will instantly get free too) and bite through it.
But still, it’s only suporting; mileage may vary. And too much will get you an upset stomach.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6465033/
Found that quickly and even though it says the results may not be significant, I’m willing to eat a couple cloves of garlic with dinner. I’ll let you know how I feel tomorrow morning.
Bettee before bed, no?
I have no idea, is that what you do or recommend?
You’ve survived every one you’ve caught so far haven’t you? That’s a testament to it’s awesomeness!
And you haven’t been mauled by any lions either, have you?
All that IS the response, and without it, a virus would kill you.
You are better off toughing it out than taking drugs that block the responses.
thank you for your advice, doctor…?
Dr Trustmebro. It’s Romanian.
Simple:
- Drink water
- I Clear the snot in the wash basin every 30 minutes
- I Don’t drink the snot that comes in backwards from
yourmy nose, no matter how lazyyou areI am feeling- spit it out in the wash basin
- this way
youI don’t get cough
- I don’t take paracetamol or symptomatic relief medicine, instead keep 2-3 handkerchiefs to keep it clean
- Sinuses blocked and blowing nose is not enough, there is a medicine for it. But if you can, try some mace and nutmeg powder instead.
- Fever? Yes. I Sleep with it.
- Feeling weak, I take some ORS (the one with sugar in it)
And the most important part, don’t go around coughing/snorting it at other people.
Sinuses blocked
There’s 2 types of medicines for this.
1 will dry up your nose, essentially stopping the exit of pathogens via that vector. The other will convert blocked-nose to running nose.
The 2nd one is desirable, if you want it to actually get fixed. Of course, you will need to clean your nose more often, as a result.deleted by creator
nimbus
Ah man too many variants to keep track of.
When I got COVID, it luckily wasn’t too bad. None of the “loss of senses” stuff.
Just had some weakness and reduced metabolism (ok, I did get pretty slim in the wrong places) for ~ a month and was then kinda fine.
The second time I got it, only a little weakness. I even walked over to the clinic for testing, alone.And I’d call that very lucky, considering that the common flu, the next year, ended up being worse on me.
When I have a cold I wear a cloth mask to bed and that actually helps reduce the sore throat I get from breathing dry air. Also, it does a pretty good job of preventing my partner from getting sick as well!
bad at it? you literally rest for a week then recover, as opposed to dying. your pretty fucking good at it. you just don’t know how bad it could be
The real question should be:
Why is our society built around disposable labor and assuming we will be at 100% functionality all the time?
Capitalism
It isn’t? That’s why you get paid sick leave.
Lol good one.
Trying to figure out if you are joking, or you are from a nicer country that getting paid sick leave is something everyone gets. Good chunk of the american work force, has to negotiate with their boss, go to a doctor that’s going to charge them between $50-$200 so they can tell you “yep you have a cold, here’s a note so you can prove it to your boss”, so you can give that note to your boss and hopefully not get fired for taking some UNPAID days off. (of course as most states are “at will” if you do that too often you still run the risk of getting fired for “no reason” later).
It’s the nicer country.
That really depends on what country you live in. The US doesn’t require sick leave AFAIK and Canada only requires 5 days. So that’s like 300 days where you have to choose between getting better or paying rent. More socially progressive countries get paid sick leave, not everyone.
Look at this guy with his sick leave and ability to stay home and rest when he’s sick!
What about him?
Yeah I think the real thing is just not understanding how bad a cold without an immune system would be. IE only real way to put it in context is, read up on what an immune-comprimised individual goes through when they get a cold.
It’s a bit like saying
“why is my countries missile defense so crappy, whenever we’re attacked there’s chunks of metal all over the ground, so much smoke and noise it makes it hard to sleep, why are we so bad at defending from missiles”.
If it makes you feel any better, your microscopic attacker is not having a very good time with your body’s response either. You’re the undefeated champion in this arena so far, keep up the winning streak.
I don’t know about who is the champion. The virus eventually fails to multiply in the host, but it meanwhile spreads to others.
How about we consider everyone a champion?
Trophies all around!
This woke-ass participation trophy shit is ruining my flu season!
The immune system is fucking incredible, you should read up on it and then you’ll never make a post like this again!
I was about to say this too. It does a pretty fucking incredible job at fighting colds.
Wait. Was this a troll post, and I just ate it up?
Blows my mind that the solution for so many things is just ‘try not to make it worse while your body does magic’ Broken bone? Stop moving it and wait. Cold? Drink water, sleep, and wait. Cut? Cover it up so it’s not actively bleeding, and wait. Even in modern medicine were still letting the body do the heavy lifting, just trying to help it out where we can. No wonder diet and exercise are such good preventative measures
There was a cartoon on it too, no?
Dude, you are in a million years battle with other organisms trying to exploit and kill you, and you’re fucking winning. I would call that a blazing success. The other organisms are trying their literal best, their survival depends on it, and you just KEEP. ON. WINNING.
Some might even call this million years battle a cold war
God dammit.
deep sigh
Okay, here’s your upvote. Now leave.
Actually, please don’t. It’s Lemmy and we need all the users we can get
I’m not using Lemmy. Do I have to leave?
The funny thing is, thanks to fever, this “cold war” is both literally and figuratively a hot war.
Russia and US typing in the chat…
15 proxy states typing
These organisms are doing their best, okay? They’re just too smol.
