I'm trying to cure my cold

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I have meds that I found at the pharmacy, called Actifed, that dry out your sinuses. I currently have a cold at the moment, but it's much more bearable with no stuffed up nose. I can't cope with a stuffed nose. I naturally sleep with my mouth closed, so when falling asleep with a stuffed nose I get sleep apnea which I don't suffer with otherwise. So taking these tablets during a cold helps me sleep better.

Just got hit with a real nasty cold, myself...took Friday and Monday off work, slept for most of the weekend.

Green tea with honey is supposed to be good for a cold. I don't know if it's true, but I drink it anyway, just to be safe.

One thing that can be a big help if taken right is zinc gluconate, but only if you have a cold caused by a rhinovirus. If you have the flu or a cold caused be anything else, it does no good.

If you take zinc gluconate, it does no good to swallow them -- you have to let them melt in your mouth so that it coats your throat. If taken early enough, they can really cut a cold short.

The way that it was discovered was because of a little girl with leukemia. She was at her doctor's office in Austin in the early 1980s for a checkup and was showing the early stages of a cold. I don't know if people with leukemia tend to have low levels of zinc, but one of the first things the doctor did was give her a zinc gluconate lozenge to swallow. However, instead of swallowing it, she let it melt in her mouth in spite of its rather foul taste. By the time she was leaving the office, her cold symptoms had pretty much disappeared.

Since zinc gluconate is so inexpensive, the doctor tried an experiment. Of his patients that came in with what appeared to be a normal cold, he gave half zinc gluconate lozenges and the other half placebos. If I remember correctly, each tablet contained 22 mg of zinc. He instructed them to let one melt in their mouth every two hours up to a maximum of something like six or eight a day. My understanding is that the current recommendations are for fewer lozenges.

For those who got the placebos, their colds lasted the expected ten days or so while those who got the zinc gluconate saw their colds last an average of something like a day and a half.

From what I understand, zinc is very good at killing rhinoviruses in a test tube. When you let it melt in your mouth and coat your throat, I think that you are basically applying it directly to the tissue that the rhinovirus most targets, greatly reducing the amount of the virus in your body.

One early research study on this was to find out if other forms of zinc might be better. From what I remember reading, none did as well as zinc gluconate and many were rather poor at killing the rhinovirus. I think that one was fairly effective, but not as effective as zinc gluconate.

This is why you see over the counter cold medications containing zinc. I've never tried them but I assume that you have to let them melt in your moth. If you swallow them, you aren't going to

I don't get many colds, but when I do, I quickly start taking the zinc gluconate. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't. I assume that when it doesn't, it's because the cold wasn't from a rhinovirus. My sister, on the other hand, hates the taste of the zinc gluconate so much that she prefers the cold.

As for the little girl with leukemia, I understand that she survived the leukemia and grew up to be an adult.

Note: I'm not a doctor and this is not medical advice. Also, keep in mind that the amount of zinc in the studies is more than is recommended -- it can have side affects and should not be continued longer than necessary.

I don't normally get colds but now that I live with my boyfriend I catch more colds because he gets a lot of colds and so I pick them up from him, no matter what I do to shield myself from it. We kiss or have sex before both of us realise he has a cold virus in him, then that's how it gets passed on.