Keep on sneezing if you want... or try this

Cold season is upon us once again. We tend not to acknowledge the common cold as something even worth worrying about until we actually catch it and realize two things:

1) Man, I forgot how much having a cold SUCKS.

and

2) Since everybody who doesn’t have a cold still isn’t acknowledging the it as anything worth worrying about, you generally don’t get much sympathy from well people.

The goal, as with any sickness, becomes all about getting over it as fast as possible. So we seek out remedies from the drug store aisles, the natural food aisles, the hippie herbal tea store aisles, and in this modern day and age, from the internet… my “aisle” motif kind of dies in “this modern day and age.” So with that in mind, allow me to share with you what I’ve found to be a nearly foolproof cure to the common cold. I stumbled upon this remedy gradually over the last few years and have found it to be – let’s not mince words – one hundred percent effective. No joke. If I feel a cold coming on and I do exactly what I am about to describe, the cold is gone by the next morning. Gone. Occasionally there are minor remnants like a minor bit of residual phlegm, but certainly nothing debilitating that makes it laborious to go about your day. That’s more than I can say for any other remedy I’ve personally ever tried.

Now I will give a disclaimer. I don’t make any promises that this remedy will work for you. I know for a fact that it works consistently for me, but I’ve never actually seen anybody else ever try it and get back to me with their results. Even my own wife, Lauren, who has seen the effectiveness of this process, has yet to actually try it out for herself… though in her defense, she still has placenta pills leftover, which seem to work just as well as a remedy. So if this doesn’t work for you, I apologize, but honestly I’d be very surprised if it didn’t work for a good percentage of people who do it and follow the directions precisely. As always, you should consult with your doctor before trying any kind of remedy… though he’s just going to tell you not to do it, so screw him. Just use your head, be a grownup and don’t come whining to me with lawyers if something bad happens to you – because unless you’re very stupid, nothing should.

Okay here we go.

My foolproof cold remedy consists of three steps:

1. CLEAN OUT THOSE EARS
2. ZINC IT UP
3. EMBRACE YOUR FEVER

I’ve found that the process works best the sooner in the cold you do it. Personally I take action as soon as I start to feel the telltale symptoms of a cold – chills, fatigue, general achiness – coming on. As soon as I get home, I mount my three-pronged attack. If I wait until I’m a day or two into the cold, I find the remedy doesn’t work as well. Oh, it still works, but I tend to have those minor residual symptoms for several days longer than if I had just knocked it out at the start.

1. CLEAN OUT THOSE EARS

Even though this is the first step in my process, it was actually the last one I learned about. I read an article on Mercola.com a couple years back about a theory suggesting that cold and flu germs don’t enter the body through the nose and mouth like most people think, but through the ears. They get inside your ear canal where they germinate, breed, get bigger, and from there they start attacking the rest of your body. So the idea is to neutralize those germs at their source before they spread. To that end, clean out your ears with Hydrogen Peroxide. Lay on your side and put 6-10 drops into your ear – basically enough to fill your ear canal – and lay there for about ten minutes, letting the bubbling peroxide do its work. Drain into a paper towel and admire all the wax that you just cleaned out of there along with any germs, then repeat on the other side.

I don’t imagine it’s a good idea to do this multiple times in a short time period. Peroxide is some serious stuff and it seems like repeated use would have some negative effects on the tissue integrity of your ears, so irrespective of whether my cold goes away, I only perform this step once.


2. ZINC IT UP

Forget NyQuil or Sudafed or Echinacea. The only supplement I have ever needed to fight off a cold is zinc. Zinc lozenges. The kind you suck on, not the kind you swallow. I honestly don’t know the science behind how they work. I don’t know why they only work by sucking on them. I just know they work. In my anecdotal experience, I have found that my fever tends to accelerate within the hour after taking my first zinc lozenge, so my own personal theory is that they somehow stimulate your body to heat up which in turn allows it to fight off the cold – which we will address in the next step. You can find zinc lozenges in the medicine section of any supermarket. Make sure you get ones that have some kind of flavoring to them because the tablets tend to have a weird gritty taste that leave your mouth feeling dry and tacky. I usually take a tablet every hour or two depending on how I feel, and always on a full stomach. Make sure you’ve got something else in your belly or you’ll be adding nausea to your list of symptoms.


3. EMBRACE YOUR FEVER

This is by far the most important step of the entire process. As far as I’m concerned the previous two steps are merely aides to this step. The real work of fighting a cold is done right here because what you’re essentially doing is allowing the body to just do its work fighting the cold its own way, which is probably how nature always intended it.

We have such a fear of fevers in this society. Fevers are always the most notable symptom of something being wrong and worried sick people start pumping themselves full of Tylenol or Ibuprofen and covering themselves with cold wet cloths in an effort fight that dreaded fever. They think the fever is the culprit when really the fever is merely a response to the culprit. A fever is what the body is actually using to fight off the infection. By taking a fever reducer, you’re actually impeding the body’s ability to do its job. So whenever I feel a cold coming on, far from doing anything to hold my fever back, I go in the opposite direction and encourage it.

First thing I do, since I usually have the chills by this point, is bring my temperature up by taking a nice hot shower. Then after drying off, I pile on the layers: thermal underwear, sweatpants, t-shirt, hooded sweatshirt, a zip-up fleece, heavy wool socks. I cover myself with blankets, put on my hood and, if I really want to go hardcore, I’ll put on a winter hat. Basically, I do everything I can do to drive my temperature up. No matter how uncomfortable I get, I never kick off the covers or peel off any layers. And then I sleep like this all night. Of course, “sleep” is a rather generous word. To be honest, it always ends up being an all around miserable night and I usually end up going out to the couch so as not to disturb Lauren with my thrashing discomfort.

The first hour or two is usually a dry heat as my body uses the fever to fight off whatever is inside me. But after awhile, the intended result begins to happen: I start to sweat. I mean really sweat. Once this starts happening I make extra certain not to move, knowing that any movement will aerate the sweat and cool me down. In this way, I allow my body to evacuate… to purge… to cleanse itself. A lot of people don’t realize this but sweat glands are actually part of the excretory system. That’s why you often feel gritty after sweating a lot – impurities have been purged from your body via the sweat glands. So in much the same way that vomiting gets rid of impurities from your stomach during a flu, sweating gets rid of impurities from your body at large. Again, I’m not sure if there is an actual science to back this up, but it just makes logical sense to me. Why would we have evolved the ability to develop a fever if it wasn’t meant to drive our body temperature up for some specific purpose? And what happens when our temperature goes up? We sweat. In my mind, when it comes to battling infection, the two seem like they must be connected.

So all throughout the night, I just let my body sweat and, as much as I can, try not to do anything else to cool it down. Not that I don’t get any respite from the heat. Whenever I get up to pee or to get some more water (because you do end up needing to drink a lot during this whole process) the sweat that has been saturating my multiple layers ventilates and I get a little bit of relief. But then it’s back to the pseudo-sauna I go. Now, for those of you following this process, let’s not be stupid. If you legitimately feel yourself asphyxiating or are otherwise having some kind of respiratory problem, by all means cool yourself down. No sense dying battling a cold. But for the rest of us, fight the discomfort for as long as you can.

At some point in the middle of the night after several hours worth of heat and sweat, I will usually notice a tangible change in my general well being. It’s hard to explain, but all I know is that it indicates that whatever my body was fighting has been effectively conquered and I just feel “better.” This is how I know it’s okay to cool down. I take off the sweatshirts and the hoods and the hats and just leave my base layers on. I usually will take an Ibruprofen at this point as well just to relax muscles that have been kind of tense from fever all night and help me fall asleep. It took me a few times attempting this process before I was able to recognize this “critical turning point.” Before that I kept the layers on all night just to be certain. But now that I am able to pinpoint the threshold between “sick” and “well” I can save myself those extra hours of discomfort.

When I wake up the next morning, I’m cured. I mean completely cured. My cold’s ass is effectively kicked and despite the crappy night of sleep I just got I practically spring out of bed from the noticeable change I can feel from the night before. I’m dehydrated as hell from all the sweating, so I make sure to guzzle water for the rest of the day. I also make sure to wash all the clothes (and sometimes the blankets too) that I have been so heavily sweating my cold out into all night long. But for all the lingering vestiges of the cold, a few hours of discomfort and one crappy night’s sleep are worth it to avoid putting up with several days worth of alternating cold symptoms and medicine-head fogginess.

So I encourage you to try it out this winter. Forget all those miracle medicines that often have the reverse effect of actually prolonging your cold. Your body knows how to fight off sickness. It’s been doing it for the last hundred thousand years or so. So all you really need to do is give it the extra tools and extra help to do its job. And that, really, is what this three-step process is all about.

Happy winter everybody!