I’ve got a cold/flu at the moment and I’m curious what type of remedies people here deploy when they are hit with a cold/flu.
Currently using a steroid/antihistamine nasal spray, decongestant tablet and decongestant spray (won’t use more then 3 days to avoid rebound)
Other than that I’ve stopped all exercise, drinking more water, using sauna a bit more, taking more hot baths with magnesium salt, getting full body sun exposure (covering face, neck, hands and arms with sunscreen)
Am I missing some miraculous thing that can solve this?
There are no miracles, but I’ve noticed something interesting.
When I’m taking rapamycin, I seem to get fewer respiratory infections. Whenever I do catch a cold or feel one coming on, I’ll take about 3–4.5 g of N-acetylcysteine (NAC) per day. I usually start as soon as I notice the first signs of an infection.
Subjectively, it feels like it speeds up recovery or sometimes even stops the infection from fully developing. But this is purely anecdotal and observational could totally be placebo.
NAC was always prescribed to me when I was a kid, so now I just use it on my own and slightly increase the dose.
Makes sense. I hardly ever take paracetamol anyway, but from what I’ve read there’s no solid evidence that NAC reduces its pain or fever relieving effects when both are taken at normal doses.
It seems like this combo is actually prescribed pretty often for mucus heavy respiratory infections.
From GPT:
Paracetamol helps with pain and fever. A small amount of it turns into a harmful byproduct called NAPQI (short for N-acetyl-p-benzoquinone imine). Under normal dosing, your liver clears NAPQI with glutathione.
NAC boosts glutathione so NAPQI is neutralized faster. This protects the liver but does not interfere with the pain relieving or fever reducing effects of paracetamol. You can safely combine normal paracetamol doses with typical NAC doses used for colds and lung support.
could totally be placebo.