5 ms·

Can you explain why you feel this way?

• deogeo 7y ago
  Anecdotal of course, but in the case of a common cold (as opposed to one where symptoms are unusually severe, or lasts too long) no-one in my family takes medicine (other than tea with honey and lemon), and the cold goes away just fine. I get the strong impression this is true for most of Europe. A little less anecdotally, a cold is a viral infection, so medicine will mostly target only its symptoms, not the underlying cause. If the symptoms are bearable, then this looks like a bad idea to me - I'm inclined to think the symptoms are there for a reason.
  • Nursie 7y ago
    Nobody is taking medication to cure the cold, just make it more bearable. Being unable to breathe through your nose serves little purpose I can think of. Your 'most of Europe' doesn't really fit with my experience of the UK.
    • ambentzen 7y ago
      Haven't you heard, the UK is not part of Europe anymore. As a generally healthy Dane, when I get the cold or the flu I generally don't take any medications for it, and neither does most of the people I know.
  • amalter 7y ago
    The symptoms are caused by the virus reproducing. At least take cough suppressant. The rest just makes you feel a little less awful. All the studies show the current OTC remedies don’t shorten illness duration (which conversely means they don’t lengthen it either). The “evolutionary response” hypothesis is a lesser form of “smart people going with their gut instead of science” - which is partly how we’ve gotten into this mess in the first place. Smart people seem to get important things wrong quite a lot.
    • deogeo 7y ago
      Not taking medicine unless necessary still seems like a good default - there's two sides to this mess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overmedication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overmedication