When I was a kid, there was only one preventative measure the members of my family took when cold-and-flu season rolled around, whether we were living in Ogden, Utah or Montgomery, Ala., or Virginia Beach:
We wore more clothing.
And when one of us did get sick, there were only two courses of treatment practiced in the household. The first involved aspirin, cough syrup, Campbell’s soup, Sprite, orange juice, bed rest and endless daytime reruns of The Andy Griffith Show and Perry Mason. The second, more intensive regimen was reserved for especially high fevers and swollen throats. It consisted of an endless wait in a military-base hospital to have our temperature taken and tonsils probed by a distracted, overworked doctor — followed by aspirin, cough syrup, Campbell’s soup, Sprite, orange juice, bed rest and endless daytime reruns of The Andy Griffith Show and Perry Mason.
Seriously, if we weren’t vomiting blood, or at the very least raising blisters on the palms laid against our foreheads, that was it. Take this, drink that and go to sleep. If you don’t feel better when you wake up, repeat.
Then I moved out of the house and began interacting with other people — many of whom experienced upbringings vastly different from mine — in all manner of situations beyond the classroom and trying to get laid. (For the sake of simplicity, we’ll include church and church-related activities under one or the other, depending.) Inevitably, some of them got sick. I was amazed not only at the variety of things they did to avoid catching a cold and to get rid of the cold once they caught it, but also at the even wider and weirder array of advice they got from everybody else.
Tell five friends (or just one co-worker — trust me, at least four others will overhear and chime in) that you feel like you’re starting to come down with a cold and you’re guaranteed to hear some interesting shit about prevention. Somebody will swear by echinacea, while somebody else will tell you that zinc is the way to go. Still another will suggest taking megadoses of Vitamin C, which will immediately be struck down by a party who’s positive that the body doesn’t work that way, that you’ll only pass the excess that never gets absorbed.
Green tea with honey.
Garlic.
Mint.
Chinese hot-and-sour soup.
In recent years, venerable cold-remedy companies have caught on to the cure-it-before-you-catch-it hype, and sometimes it seems like commercials for prevention-focused products now outnumber the familiar once-you’ve-got-it remedies. Some of your friends will swear by these multivitamin immune-system boosters, but others will call them bullshit, saying you’ve gotta see the woman at the holistic shop put the herbs in the gelatin capsules with your own eyes.
If and when you do get sick, all of the aforementioned favorites are reiterated, along with a whole new phalanx of healing aids.
(Except maybe echinacea, because while nobody knows whether or not it actually boosts the immune system, everybody is somehow positive that it’s worthless once you’re actually sick.)
In addition to the usual decongestants, cough suppressants, pain relievers and various combinations thereof, you’ve got your VapoRub. You’ve got your Sunny D. You’ve got your no-dairy diet so your body creates less phlegm. You’ve got your mix of cranberry juice and ginger ale, because maybe the cold is in your kidneys and, well, cranberry juice sucks without a mixer. You’ve got your TheraFlu and its countless hot-drink-mix competitors. You’ve got your aromatherapy scents. In case you just need feel better for a day, you’ve got your whiskey, and if you think your cold is turning into something worse, you’ve got your concentrated one-dose “Z-Pack” of antibiotics.
New cures come. Cures that were used thousands of years ago come again. And the cures that you grew up taking, for the most part, never go away.
Obviously, this is because no one knows what causes the common cold. That’s why cold medicines have continued to be refined over millennia, while nothing has been officially debunked as ineffective. They all might be doing something; hell, none of them might be doing anything. Your body might’ve fought off the cold by itself during the same time that you happened to be applying leeches to your throat and ingesting powdered honeycomb — or that stuff might’ve helped, who knows?
I happen to think it’s all bullshit. Sure, I take pills and lozenges and whatever else I grab at the Walgreens when I get sick. But I don’t think I do it because I actually believe these things will help conquer my headache and nausea and sore throat. I think I do it for the same reason that the most skeptical agnostics don’t go ahead and call themselves atheists, and that they sometimes pray.
I do it because it probably can’t hurt, and why not hedge my bets?
Furthermore, I think that pharmaceutical scientists are very close to figuring out how to cure the common cold and that their higher-ups, the money men, aren’t very happy with what the experiments are telling them. There’s gotta be a cure, and it probably consists mostly of bed rest and plenty of healthy liquids. There’s one other element that’s missing from the formula, and the folks in charge of finding it are increasingly concerned that it’s something from which they can’t make assloads of money; they just don’t know exactly what it is, yet.
Of course, this might just be paranoia talking.
But tell me this: Why can’t I watch endless reruns of The Andy Griffith Show and Perry Mason on daytime TV anymore?
Talk about hedging one’s bets.
This article appears in Dec 6-12, 2006.
