 | How Does The Common Cold Affect Your Body
  The question how does the common cold affect your body has been asked time and time again. And the truth is there is no one answer. Different people are going to experience different symptoms and ailments during a cold virus attack. Some will have side effects to known medications designed to alleviate the more worry some symptoms. Runny nose, sneezing, sore throat and fever are the most common problems. In this article we examine the different ways the human body is effected and how to treat them.
Whenever you sneeze, everyone within earshot is apt to respond with an earnest “God bless you.” Your well-wishers might be surprised to learn that their casual expression of concern was once designed to ward off demons. The phrase goes back to ancient times, when the great explosion of air that accompanies a sneeze was widely believed to be caused by the soul leaving the body. Unless someone immediately spoke the protective words, demons would rush into the vacuum to take possession of the sneezer, and something far worse than a runny nose would surely follow.
As preventive medicine, “God bless you” has no known effect on the course of a cold. A good many other devices, however, do lessen the misery, if not the duration, of upper respiratory infection. The discomforts you experience during a cold—nasal blockage, headache, sneezing, sore throat, cough and, occasionally, hoarseness—are actually the secondary symptoms of a virtually unsensed viral invasion that your own body will eventually repel. If you can control, reduce or mask some of these symptoms, you can wait out the natural life of your cold in considerably better humor.
Dealing with the symptoms requires some understanding of them and of the treatments that are effective against them. At the first hint of what might be a cold, some people ransack the medicine cabinet to assemble a varied feast of remedies for any and all contingencies. This strategy is counterproductive on a number of scores. The cold—if that is what it is—has already taken up residence and cannot be nipped in the bud by any combination of drugs. Premature medication will make it harder to evaluate the symptoms as they develop.
And no drug, not even aspirin, is 100 per cent safe; when a disease is as mild as colds generally are, you and your body are best served by taking the least medication necessary. Start your own cold regimen by making a few temporary changes in your normal patterns of behavior, and see if you do not feel a lot better right away. The first step is the simplest but, for many sufferers, the most difficult: Make up your mind to go easy on yourself for the next three or four days. If you feel lethargic or sleepy, get some extra rest; go to bed early or relax with a book until your energy returns. Stay home from work if your body tells you to. Your absence will not spare your associates—by the time your symptoms appear you have already exposed them to your viruses—but when you are demoralized and feel like a red-nosed pariah, you are probably not very efficient at whatever you do, and you will not accomplish much. Do not try to keep a cold- ridden child in bed during the day unless the youngster asks to go there, but do limit the child’s activity.
If your appetite for solid food lags, do not be concerned; the old saw, Feed a cold and starve a fever, goes too far on both counts. Light, appealing, easily digested foods make nutritional sense for either a cold or a mild fever, but if all you feel like eating is lemon sherbet, give in to your whim. Comfort is the key issue; an eccentric diet during the few days that a cold lasts will have no lasting effect on your health. How does the common cold affect your body? - definite loss of appetite.
Drink a lot of beverages. Fluids do not flush a cold away as was once believed, but they do work to loosen sticky mucus in the upper respiratory passages, thus improving drainage and easing stuffiness. They also soothe a sore, dry throat and in a body stricken by fever, replace water lost by increased perspiration. Un-chilled fruit juices are good; their strong flavor gets through the most taste-deadening cold. Milk, which has a subtler flavor and a tendency to stimulate excess mucus flow in some people, may be among the least satisfactory fluids during a cold.
Alcoholic beverages are credited with semi-legendary curative powers, and not by laymen alone: An old English medical text recommended that the patient “go home, hang his hat on the four poster, and proceed to drink whisky quantum sufficiently to see two hats.” This ancient pacifier has several drawbacks. Alcohol should never be mixed with any medicine you may take for a cold, because together they can add up to a dangerous dose of depressants. Even by itself, alcohol may add to existing nasal irritation, increasing congestion and headache while it temporarily diverts the drinker.
If after considering these facts, you still want a cocktail or a toddy, make it a weak one, then wait at least eight hours before taking any cold medication. The best of all fluids for easing stuffiness are hot, nonalcoholic beverages. Researchers at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach, Florida, tested one time-honored miracle of medicine: hot chicken soup. Their experiment was a model of objectivity and scientific precision. They first measured how long it took mucus to clear the nasal passages of a group that had taken no liquids for several hours. They then re-measured each person in the sample after administering identical doses of cold water, hot water and hot chicken soup.
The researchers found that the cold water decreased the speed at which mucus cleared the nasal passages by 2.8 millimeters per minute. Hot water speeded clearance by 2.2 millimeters, hot chicken soup by 2.3 millimeters. The fact that the subjects had inhaled water vapor while drinking the hot liquids accounted for the speed-up in clearance, and the soup may have won the contest by a nose: The researchers speculated that the aroma of the chicken in the broth somehow stimulated the nasal cilia to an extra tenth of a millimeter of effort. At best, the effects of the hot liquids were short-lived—normal nasal stuffiness returned in half an hour—but as chicken soup is nutritious, tasty and low in calories, there is no good reason not to follow Grandmother’s advice. Drink the soup as often as you like. Hot tea and hot coffee are also beneficial beverages, but only in normal daily amounts.. | Most Popular Common Cold And Flu ArticlesHow Does The Common Cold Affect Your Body Palpitations And Need To Cough Cough With Frothy White Sputum Types Of Rheumatic Heart Fever Pain Constant Low Grade Fever Nutritional Requirements Needed To Treat Fever Flu Symptoms With Neck And Back Pain And Muscle Aches Who Discovered Influenza Is Canada Ready For A Pandemic Influenza | |
| Parents should monitor a child’s intake of fluids with special care. Youngsters are more likely than adults to lose their appetite for liquids of any sort during a cold. If they refuse juice and water, try weak sweetened tea, soda pop that has been allowed to go flat, and warm soups or broths. A less familiar alternative is fruit-flavored gelatin desserts, in either jelled or liquid form, offered in small but frequent doses. Do not tempt a child with sweetened milk, milk shakes or ice cream, which may increase nasal secretion. How does the common cold affect your body? - a runny nose and watery eyes are common place.
The next step beyond fluids taken by mouth is a home humidifier or vaporizer, but researchers are far from agreement on the value of either device for a run-of-the-mill cold. It was long believed that the dry, artificially heated indoor air of winter was a major contributor to the seasonal rise in colds, and many people equipped their homes and workplaces with large humidifying devices, generally as parts of heating and air conditioning systems. Bu the importance of humidity in the spread of colds has been sharply downgraded, while the safety of the devices themselves has come into question. Cool-air humidifiers have been found to be breeding grounds for a variety of bacterial and fungal organisms that cause health problems of their own. If the water reservoir is not clean, a humidifier can broadcast agents that produce a reaction in some individuals, known as humidifier fever.
A different kind of humidifying device, the steam vaporizer sold in drugstores, has long been used to moisten the air around victims of respiratory diseases. Steam vaporizers are less likely to lead to infection because microorganisms cannot survive the heat of the steam, but bacteria and fungi can and do grow in the cooler plastic parts of these devices.
For some cold complications, such as the severe form of laryngitis called croup, a vaporizer is all but essential. With croup. increased humidity is the recommended treatment to ease labored breathing. The moisture in the air evaporates in the body’s airways, cooling them and reducing the swelling of the larynx and lower airways that interferes with breathing. And if cough and nasal obstruction from an ordinary cold keep you from sleeping, a vaporizer on the floor of the bedroom may bring some relief. How does the common cold affect your body? - a terrible illness called Croup.
Before plugging in a cool-mist machine, make sure that mineral deposits and slimy residues have been cleaned from the reservoir with a detergent since the device was last used; as long as you use the machine, change the water and c4n the reservoir every day. Direct the flow of air so that it does not spray the cold sufferer directly but suffuses the room.
You cannot, incidentally, improve a machine’s effect on stuffiness by adding menthol, camphor, oil of eucalyptus or some other volatile substance to the water. Such substances may smell good but they have no proved therapeutic value, and they may cause additional irritation of the mucous membranes of the nose.
With or without the extra humidity, you will have to blow your nose now and then, and you will want to protect it from suffering any more abuse than it has to. There are in fact right ways and wrong ways to blow the nose. Avoid high-pressure blowing, or blowing one nostril at a time; instead, exhale gently through both nostrils, holding a handkerchief or tissue before the openings but touching and wiping the tender flesh as little as possible. The heroic honking some people pride themselves on strains the blood vessels of the nose and strains the lungs; if the nasal passages are tightly obstructed, the pressure may backfire, forcing infected mucus deep into the sinuses or Eustachian tubes, where it can cause severe secondary complications.
For much the same reason, do not routinely sniff up runny material to clear your nose; if you have small children, take every opportunity before, during and after their colds to teach them how to blow their noses, so that they will not develop the sniffling habit. Very young children often have a difficult time with nasal obstruction. Feeding periods are particularly troublesome: It is all but impossible to suck from a bottle or nurse at the breast while breathing through the mouth. You can improve a child’s labored breathing by using an infant nasal aspirator, a rubber bulb fitted with a plastic siphon, to draw off accumulated mucus and clear the nasal passages just before the child’s feeding time.
Less troublesome than stuffiness, but often just as irritating, is what might be called the red-nose syndrome, which almost everyone suffers at some stage of a cold. To reduce this unpleasant result of chapping and frequent wiping, daub a little petroleum jelly on the affected area. The treatment works particularly well if you apply the jelly just before going to sleep, so that it will be undisturbed for several hours. This highlights how does the common cold affect your body. | Twitter About The Common Cold Cure  | | Common Cold Tip Of The Day The real hazard of herpes infections is that a victim’s saliva and blister fluid contain live virus, which can invade any microscopic skin abrasion. Herpes simplex type 1 also can infect the genital organs, although venereal infections caused by a different virus, herpes simplex type 2, are more common. |
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