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
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?
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.
The better comparison would be to say that solar power panels are a complete design mistake because they get hot when in the sun thus hampering their function. Yes, it is not perfect, but it still works way better than nothing.
It’s incredibly good at responding to infections. That’s why you’re alive.
Taking medicine to reduce symptoms when you’re sick, actually increases the amount of time that you’re sick. You reducing the effectiveness of your body’s fight.
If you find yourself often getting sick, take a look at your overall health, especially your metabolic health. Make sure you’re getting enough sleep, zinc, sunlight, and avoiding sugar as much as you can.
Processed sugar or all sugar including in fruit?
Getting rid of processed sugar is a great start
There’s a lot of controversy about the other sugars, but I’m in the keto camp, so I would say anything that elevates your blood glucose should be avoided. So that would include sugar in fruit
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.
A lot of people in this thread saying that viruses are losing when we live through a cold. That’s just not true. Their goal is to live/reproduce, not to kill. They’re winning at a different game, it just hurts us as a byproduct.
You know symptoms is the tangible evidence of your body fighting the fucker? I’m no scientist but I remember hearing that apparently a raised body temp is one method of killing the cunt that’s trying to attack you.
With these symptoms you can’t run, you can’t hunt, you can’t burn too many calories. Your body does everything in its power to prevent you from using resources your body needs to defeat the sickness.
That’s the reason why placebo meds work: the fact that the doctor gave you medicine means that you are really sick, and therefore you have to rest. In reality you’re behaving differently and therefore you’ll get healthy faster.
Oh: and you’re slightly dehydrated so you don’t have that much risk of infecting others.
We are tribal animals. Apes together strong. We care for the sick ones because that means they can focus on recovery.
Is that why placebos work? I could swear they had done studies that show that placebos can be as effective as medication under certain conditions, all other things being equal. Maybe not as effective as medication, but more effective than non-treatment.
I found a study some time ago about pets and placebos, where the subscription of meds for the pet resulted in different behavior by the pet owner, I couldn’t find it but here’s an article about it: https://www.veterinaryprescriber.org/free-articles/the-caregiver-placebo-effect-in-osteoarthritis-treatments
Good find. Key paragraph:
When measured objectively over the 42-day evaluation period, limb function improved in 12.1% and worsened in 8.6%, but did not change in most dogs. By contrast, caregivers (both owners and vets) reported improvements in lameness from the start, with the reported improvements increasing with time. The caregiver placebo effect appeared to be around 57% for owners and 40–45% for vets and was statistically significant at all assessment time points.
Objective measurements are one way to detect this effect. Another would be a true double-blind trial where neither owner nor vet knows which medicine was given.
Only if the medication doesn’t work. The evidence is that placebos don’t work. Mostly, the placebo effect is a statistical illusion.
It is plausible that the body will expend more energy to combat a disease if you are (sub-)consciously convinced that you are cared for and don’t need to stress. Stress hormones down-regulate the immune response. Cortisol, used for treatment of autoimmune disorders like asthma and allergies, is a stress hormone.
But a sham treatment could also have the opposite effect. If your subconscious understands that as a signal that you must get back into action, you may end up releasing stress hormones. These psychological effects are just too idiosyncratic and fickle to be used reliably.
Stuff like broken bones or cancer doesn’t respond to psychology at all. The body is already doing all it can.
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
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.
Is there a Best of Lemmy? This should definitely be on there. Kudos.
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.
Thank you for sharing this! A good read.
The common cold is a family of coronaviruses, our bodies have been fighting off their mutations for millennia. An mRNA vaccines for colds, if I remember correctly, was in the works, but, well, we’ve all seen what’s happening there
Its more often rhinoviruses rather than coronaviruses or other families
I disagree, there’s no way a rhino could fit in there
Everything’s a dildo if you’re brave enough!
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So does that mean a long time ago people were dying of the cold in droves?
Certainly possible, if not likely, that when these viruses first evolved to infect humans or human ancestors they caused increased mortality. Common coronaviruses and rhinoviruses still kill a lot of people, they’re often associated with pneumonia
See the natives of America after Europeans showed up.
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!
You’re only seeing the colds that made it through the defenses, without having any means of measuring the ones your immune system successfully blocked or kicked out before they could take hold.
So your statistics are flawed.
And even then most of the ones that made it through/past the immune system are still eventually fought off again by the immune system. I.e. you don’t have to take an external antibiotic for every cold.
Your immune system and the virus are at war, the symptoms are collateral damage.
Some of those symptoms are caused by the virus as part of its strategy for spreading. They make you likely to leak infectious fluid from your nose and mouth. Meanwhile your body has to learn how to recognize a virus that has evolved to be hard to recognize (and do that without also accidentally “recognizing” some of your own cells and killing you) and then track down every last virus. And there can be billions of viruses, many of which are hiding inside your own cells.
You’d spoil about as fast as food left out of the fridge (but due to bacteria and fungi, not viruses) if not for the constant battle your immune system fights.
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.
