Don’t just feed a cold. Take it to an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Engorge it with freshly carved roast beef. Stuff it with boiled new potatoes. Let it have two pieces of cream pie, if it wants.
Offer to pay its tab.
It won’t make a difference.
The deprivations you practice on a fever are your own business, but shoving food down a throat as red and swollen as a baboon heinie in mating season will leave you almost exactly as you were before: sniffling and achy, but needing to loosen your belt a notch.
This truth, at least, remains eternal: You cannot cure the common cold. You may be able to tackle the symptoms or sideline some of the suffering, but you are just calling timeouts until your body decides to defeat the viruses that caused the thing in the first place.
Now that January is upon us like the anti-comforter, this is relevant. Cold season-and its more dangerous sidekick, flu season-began in mid-autumn and will last through spring, provoking coughing, nose dripping, phlegm dislodging and assorted other totems of impolite society.
In offices, schoolhouses, commuter trains and other close quarters around the metropolitan area, the sick season is especially evident. Ailing workers are coughing on their colleagues or, just as aggravating, staying home and forcing extra work on the well.
Colds cause millions of lost workdays every year. In recent years, they also were the leading reason for visits to the doctor. Since the onset of HMOs, though, that may have changed. Every HMO patient knows that his cold will be gone-as will his youth-before he can actually get in to see his doctor.
Many more millions bring their sickness to work with them, managing to keep their seat warm and their vacation time undiminished, but striking fear into the upper respiratory tracts of colleagues.
George Figueroa, a 30-year-old officer with the state’s Central Management Service police department, was on duty Thursday at the State of Illinois Center packing a handkerchief along with his usual weaponry.
Figueroa said he, along with his father and sister, blamed his mother for giving them head colds over the holidays, an illness that is combining with allergies to leave him achy and sniffly.
Figueroa said he is taking “anything I can get my hands on-SineAid, NyQuil, Allerest. People are giving me things from their doctors. . . .”
The one thing he hasn’t considered taking is time off.
“No,” said Figueroa, laughing. “I’m saving my sick days for summer-when I feel good.”
If you are the desk neighbor of a Figueroa, no less an authority than Miss Manners counsels understanding.
“It is all very well to say that it is rude to come in sick,” said Judith Martin, who writes the syndicated column, “but people who say this should be aware that there are limitations to sick leave, that people have compelling financial reasons for this very unfortunate practice.”
If you must work ill, she said, you should “protect other people as much as you possibly can, and that means not only from germs but from unaesthetic sights. I suppose the ideal way to work would be with a towel over your head and your face in a steamer, but I don’t know how much you’d get done that way.”
One wonders how Miss Manners would feel about Victor Rivera, who periodically Thursday afternoon closed the coffee shop he works in at the State of Illinois Center to deal with the consequences of his stomach flu.
Returning to his post, he’d make himself some lemon tea, just one part of his three-part cold remedy. “To me, it’s tea and peanut butter and turkey. If you eat the healthy foods and stay away from greasy stuff, you’ll be okay,” he said.
Rivera eschews doctors (“too expensive”) and over-the-counter remedies (“too expensive”), believing rightly that his body will do the job.
“Cold” is a misnomer. Studies show no relation between exposure to chill air and development of a cold. Instead, winter is theorized to be cold and flu season because people are indoors together a lot more, making it more likely for them to pass the viruses that cause the cold. Here’s another theory: Frequent changes in temperature lower the body’s resistance to viruses.
This imprecision is disturbing, but it is a vast improvement over what Hippocrates used to think. The Greek physician, recognized as the father of medicine, believed colds were the result of waste building up in the brain and overflowing through the nose. This, we now know, is laughable. Modern medical science has taught us that on those days when waste does build up in the brain, it actually overflows through the ears, causing hearing loss.
For evidence of why over-the-counter drug people would never joke about such a thing, visit a decent-sized drugstore. On display there you will find an aisle of “cold remedies” comparable in absurd variety to the gauntlet of breakfast cereals at a supermarket.
The formula seems to be to come up with an appropriately clinical name, preferably one with an `X’ in it (Drixoral, Comtrex . . .) and offer it in approximately 97 permutations: regular, maximum strength, children’s, caplets, gelcaps, tablets, daytime formula, dissolvable packets, LiquiCaps(reg. trademark), and several different flavors and package sizes.
“We get offered over 100 new cough and cold products a year,” said Michael Polzin, a spokesman for the 1,751-store Walgreen Co.
If you’re the type who is amused by woefulness in others, hang out in a cold aisle and watch a consumer, his nose red and dripping, ponder his choices. And then watch him pay. One multi-symptom medication costs $6.49 for 24 tablets, and many cold sufferers go through two or three seeking relief.
Randy D’Agostino, a 29-year-old bartender, said he has “tried everything” fighting his three-week cold. “With nose spray and everything else, I’ve probably spent $100.” Late last week, he was still sniffling.
Curing the cold remains out of medical science’s grasp, primarily because its symptoms are caused by a wide variety of viruses. If a vaccine were to be developed to fight off all of them, it would likely do the body more harm than does the disease.
Recently touted or researched possible remedies (and their drawbacks) include: interferon (too expensive, possibly not good for extended use); dipping fingers frequently in iodine to prevent transmission of colds (a pain, and it discolors your fingers); and sucking zinc (which seems to fight colds, according to at least one study, but leaves a noxious taste in your mouth for days).
Many people swear by Vitamin C, but there is little evidence for it. Swilling orange juice won’t hurt, though, because it’s always good to drink lots of liquids.
University of Illinois engineering student Esperanza Salinas said that in Mexican culture there are many herbal cold remedies, but neither these nor over-the-counter medicine nor extra sleep could keep a series of colds first semester from holding her grades down to about a C average.
Real-estate agent Aaron Robinson, 30, had this suggestion: “Sleep with your hat and socks on at night. It keeps you from coughing,” he said. “And don’t go outside until July.”
In 1991, Americans spent about $2.6 billion on over-the-counter cold and related medicines, generally sold at about a 50 percent markup, according to Lucretia Schafroth of Kline & Co., a consulting firm that tracks the drug industry.
The fact that all these new products are coming out without any advances in their actual active ingredients makes one wonder about the balance between marketing and medicine.
Last year, some 40 new products were introduced for colds (many more when you count those targeted at symptoms such as coughing, sore throat or runny nose), Schafroth said, and three in five were a “line extension,” an industry term for “repackaging.”
The newest product to hit the market, she said, is something called Dristan Juice Mix-In, formulated to mix with orange juice, a clever combination of medicine and folk remedy.
But the very best named of all the products is something called 666 Cold Preparation, a mixture of analgesic and decongestant whose slogan isn’t but should be: “Fights colds like the anti-Christ.”
Consumer Reports urges that people, instead of buying a costly “shotgun” medicine that treats all symptoms, just buy one that targets their most bothersome symptoms. It also questions the effectiveness of antihistamines on colds, a doubt shared by others.
“Antihistamine can dry up your secretions, which makes it worse,” said Dr. Constance Pachucki, a clinical assistant professor of medicine at Loyola University Medical Center and Hines Veterans Administration Hospital. “I don’t use antihistamines at all with upper respiratory problems. With allergies, yes, but certainly not with respiratory.”
Yet antihistamines are in many of the shotgun cold remedies, and the Nonprescription Drug Manufacturers contends that more than a dozen studies have shown they are effective against cold symptoms.
For cold sufferers, Pachucki recommends good nutrition, rest and liquids, as well as acetaminophen (the active ingredient in Tylenol) for fevers.
To prevent the passing of infections in wintertime, your mother’s advice still holds: Wash your hands frequently, avoid intimacies with the ill and keep your unwashed hands away from your mouth and eyes.
Perhaps Sir William Osler, the renowned Canadian medical educator of the 19th and early 20th Centuries, said it best: “There’s only one way to treat the common cold-with contempt.”
