Ahh, winter. The season when I stare forlornly out the window, looking at the rain and wind, my pockets filled to the brim with tissues, wondering how it can be that there are so many brainy people in the world and we still haven't found a cure for the common cold.
Winter is the season that often has me feeling a little bewildered, and that's not just a symptom of the common cold. The reason is mostly because winter seems like the time when people around me try and tell me the latest thing that is just ‘the best thing ever' for treating their cold: Echinacea, honey drops, neti pots, Vitamin C - they all claim they do something miraculous.
When I'm feeling like my head is full of cotton wool and someone hands me an Echinacea tablet for my cold, all I can do is look befuddled. They hit me when I'm down: the last thing I feel like doing when I've got a cold is have a hearty debate on the placebo effect and confirmation bias.
Not that I blame them for their enthusiasm. It's not like the media, alternative health stores, and even pharmacies are very careful about what they claim is beneficial to our health. I saw an article on Stuff last month touting the benefits of kombucha. I didn't even want to know what it is or what it's supposed to do. I Googled it and I saw the pictures. No thanks.
Of course anything can seem miraculous when it's paired with the cure of time. We know that the common cold will get better in a week or so - no matter what herb, tincture or homeopathic remedy you decide to ingest. Which is why it's so easy to think that the herb, tincture or homeopathic remedy you ingested actually worked.
We also almost always underestimate our own immune systems. A colleague of mine swears by upping her intake of Vitamin C when she feels a cold coming on. And when the cold miraculously doesn't manifest, hallelujah! Vitamin C is amazing! But she never does stop and think that maybe, just maybe, her own body's immune system was already doing the work that the Vitamin C was apparently doing.
Time, rest, some aspirin or ibuprofen and maybe a nasal spray to help with the symptoms is pretty much all the remedies that seem to work, according to science-based medicine. It may be the common cold, but there is no common cure yet. So next time you have a cold, save some of your money and pass on the herbal remedies and vitamin tablets. Just take a sick day or two, stay in bed, binge on some Netflix TV shows and have some soup. These things may not cure you, but it just might make you feel better. As the saying goes, “A treated cold lasts seven days, and an untreated cold lasts a week.”