How do you fight off a cold?

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  • CrawlingChaos
    CrawlingChaos Posts: 87
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    I alternate echinacea and elderberry all winter, as preventatives, which does seem to help. I also take ginger root capsules and grate fresh or powdered ginger into a lot of my food, particularly if I feel scratchy (reliant on my voice for work, so colds are BAD news.). Apart from that, zinc and Vit C, garlic in everything and masses of water/liquids. Lemon/honey/ginger/cloves and a slug of olive oil as a drink seems to help too. It's not ideal on the calorie front, but if I've just started a cold I drink a litre or so of fresh-squeezed orange juice on the first day, and also ginger beer made with proper ginger rather than flavourings. Anything to increase Vit C and ginger intake!

    There is also a European homeopathy product called Oscillococcinum, which you can take weekly as a preventative measure, or several times a day if you have a cold. Don't know if you can get it where you are, but I highly recommend it, despite normally being very sceptical about alternative remedies other than the long-standing immune fortifiers.

    I don't mean to be an *kitten*, but above all the recommendations, homeopathy is the worst. It is just water. There is no mechanism for it to possibly work. It started with a guy who saw contaminates in a slide on his microscope that nobody else has ever seen. You'd need to break physics for it to work. If the proclaimed mechanisms of homeopathy worked, fringing sea water should cure you of just about everything.

    http://www.1023.org.uk/
  • castadiva
    castadiva Posts: 2,016 Member
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    Oscillococcinum's not really homeopathic, and isn't water-based in any case, but I couldn't think of another word to describe it! I share your reservations about homeopathic treatments. I guess it's probably better described as an over-the-counter medication.
  • CrawlingChaos
    CrawlingChaos Posts: 87
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    Oscillococcinum's not really homeopathic, and isn't water-based in any case, but I couldn't think of another word to describe it! I share your reservations about homeopathic treatments. I guess it's probably better described as an over-the-counter medication.

    Not water based, true in a sense since the pills are just sugar, but its made by diluting duck liver (and heart I think) to like 200C, which essentially means there's nothing in it, into water which is then evaporated and sugar pill-ified. Its homeopathy. :P.

    (PS thanks for not getting annoyed at me, I feel I tend to come off like a jerk in these topics even though I don't mean to.)
  • castadiva
    castadiva Posts: 2,016 Member
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    Oscillococcinum's not really homeopathic, and isn't water-based in any case, but I couldn't think of another word to describe it! I share your reservations about homeopathic treatments. I guess it's probably better described as an over-the-counter medication.

    Not water based, true in a sense since the pills are just sugar, but its made by diluting duck liver (and heart I think) to like 200C, which essentially means there's nothing in it, into water which is then evaporated and sugar pill-ified. Its homeopathy. :P.

    (PS thanks for not getting annoyed at me, I feel I tend to come off like a jerk in these topics even though I don't mean to.)

    Not a problem - you know more about this particular pill than I do, clearly! I first bought it in Holland, and I don't really read Dutch - just enough to get the gist, and I was desperate for something, anything, to stave off a cold and Upper Respiratory Tract-infection. I just know that it seems to work, and I'm all about staying cold-/flu- and URT-infection - free! Duck liver or whatever it takes!

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