Jed, the cure is simple. When you feel a cold coming on, take a hot
sauna or hot-tub. The virus does not like the increased body temperature
this produces. Afterwards, bundle up and stay warm. Do not take aspirin.
Repeat several times while taking lots of fluids to wash the reaction
products out of the body. Large doses of vitamin C also help. If the
virus is still in the nasal passages, breathing steam helps kill them.
Ed
Jed Rothwell wrote:
I am stricken with a stuffy nose and post-nasal drip. This happens to me
a lot.
In lieu of sleeping, I got to thinking about we might treat the common
cold, in the distant future. What would be the ideal treatment, given
what we now know? Let us assume we do not discover some panacea that
wipes out all rhinoviruses.
Nowadays, you wake up feeling kind of stuffy, with a slight cough and an
irritated throat. What next? What I do is pretend there is nothing wrong
for a day, and then I resort to saline solutions to irrigate the sinuses
(which are dry) and decongestants. As far as I can tell, this does
nothing to cure the problem but it alleviates the symptoms. As they say,
with the best treatment you can cure a cold in about 7 days, whereas if
you leave it alone it gets better in a week.
In the distant future . . . You wake up feeling kind of stuffy, not even
at the irritation phase, but you take no chances. You call in the robot
nurse-practitioner. No visits to the doctor or drug store where you
might infect someone else. No waiting. The robot arrives in an
self-driving automobile/mobile lab 15-minutes later.
The robot comes into your house, checks your vital signs, and takes a
swab from your nose. It puts the sample in a DNA analysis machine and
determines that you do have a cold. It genotypes the virus, reports back
to the CDC main computer, and downloads instructions and cautions. If it
is a dangerous virus or an unknown, unrecognizable type, it calls an
ambulance which takes you to a human doctor. That hardly ever happens.
What usually happens is the robot selects a vaccine targeting the
particular strain of virus you are infected with. Or, perhaps, in the
more distant future, it does on-the-spot recombinant splicing and gins
up exactly what you need. It give you a shot (or topical swab, or
whatever works). It gives you a 1-day supply of decongestant pills, 2
liters of orange juice, and it suggest you get some bed rest. (Or in a
more authoritarian society, it orders you not to go out of the house or
infect anyone else, and assigns a small watchdog robot to record who you
come in contact with.)
You take it easy, wake up the next morning, and cold is gone.
Treatment like this might be available today -- I wouldn't know. But I
expect this would cost thousands of dollars and probably days of effort
to identify the virus, with human-labor intense methods. By the time you
did this, the cold will get better on its own. In the scenario I
envision the whole job is done in 15 minutes by a robot, and it costs
effectively nothing.
- Jed
