Skip to main content

Gargling for Common Cold Prevention

🐣 25+ Best Memes About Segata Sanshiro Meme | Segata Sanshiro Memes

A solution for the common cold that's tough to swallow

How do I keep from getting sick this cold and flu season?

The easy answer is frequent hand washing, especially before eating as it's generally viruses getting in your nose or mouth that cause people to get sick and most of the time it comes from the hands, though can also be from people coughing and sneezing in your vicinity.

But as a species, we are terrible at changing habits and this includes touching your face.  If I were to tell you right now not to touch your face, which I kinda am, most people will get the urge to touch their face.  I don't know why we do it, but it doesn't seem evolutionarily advantageous.

So, let's say you are trying your hardest but still want another layer of protection.  Everybody will try to sell you some supplement that will keep you from getting sick.  If something worked really well, everybody would be doing the same thing.  I think it has something to do with the free market but I came pretty close to failing economics.  As you've noticed, everyone swears by something different that prevents colds so my leaning based on the evidence is that we should be looking for the cheapest and easiest and most effective solution.

To that end, after some research, I found a study from Japan from about 15 years ago that looked at gargling as a way to prevent upper respiratory infections.  This is apparently a common practice in Japan already.  They had people try either doing nothing, gargling with water, or gargling with an iodine solution.  They did it 3 times consecutively for about 15 seconds, three times a day, for 2 months.

The thinking is that it takes 8-12 hours of virus being in the back of your throat in order to multiply enough to cause an infection and by doing some deep gargling, you rinse all that out.

What they found was that in the water gargling group, about a third less people ended up getting sick than either the doing nothing group and the iodine garglers.  Side note: garglers is my new favorite word and sounds like a colloquial term we would have had back in Texas.

It was a small study and it's tough to assess the validity of things like this which is probably why it hasn't been publicized BUT it seems to have zero risks and it's free and probably just takes a reminder alarm so I think I'm going to give it a try this year and see how it works as between being in the clinic and also around 2 kids in daycare, I feel like I'm as much a magnet for germs as dropping your cotton candy in the sewer.

If you're interested in reading about this study, you can check it out here
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Multivitamins

If you can get the lid off, you probably don't need them When I ask people if they are taking any vitamins, herbs or supplements, many people will say they are taking a multivitamin.  When I ask them why they take it, I get a quizzical look most of the time. I think this is something that resonates from childhood and parental advice of the idea that we need vitamins to help our body develop.  I'm not pediatrician so I can't speak to the effects on the developing child, but I will say that most non-pregnant adults without major medical conditions do not need extra vitamins. You'll be impressed by these labels promising 120%, 300%, 1200% of your daily dose of vitamin whatever it is, but the truth is that for most of these vitamins, if you take more than your daily dose your body needs, the rest just ends up in your urine.  You are literally peeing money away in this case. There's been a new trendy vitamin every decade or so for the last 40-50 years; First it...
Read more

Kidney Stones

I've written about this previously , but it's often hard to explain to people what a 10 is on the "1-10" pain scale if they haven't been in that spot before.  For women who have had children, they generally know what a 10 is, but for men it's a little harder.  When I was a medical student on my psychiatry rotation, we had a patient calmly sitting there saying his pain level was at a 10 and our resident, who was an ex-military sniper with a large skull tattoo on his forearm and a crosshair through the eye, calmly leaned forward and asked, "so if I lit you on fire and ran you over with my truck, you could not be in more pain than you are now, correct?"  The patient changed his answer. Getting to the point, a kidney stone is about the close I can come to describing a 10/10 pain to people who haven't gone through childbirth.  The fundamental issue is similar - your body is trying to move a big solid thing through an opening that was not really desig...
Read more

NSAIDs

Advil and Motrin are ibuprofen, then you have Aleve (naproxen).  Those are the over-the-counter ones.  Prescriptions are Mobic (meloxicam), nabumetone, indomethacin, Toradol (ketorolac), diclofenac, Lodine, and the list goes on.  All of these medications are in a class called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). I'm giving you this list because there is mounting evidence that these medications a) don't work as well as we'd thought and b) have some very serious long term side effects we're finding out more about. NSAID's act by reducing the amount of prostaglandins you make in order to reduce inflammation.  However, prostaglandins have a ton of other effects and are involved in the maintenance of just about AIDs and also stronger if they are taken every day and/or around-the-clock.  every other organ system that you have.  The effect is stronger with higher doses of NS NSAID's work best and are best indicated for times when something is r...
Read more