Treatment For Blocked Eustachian Tubes, Itchy Nose And Cough
  Keeping up your defenses - With Treatments
Humorist Robert Benchley once addressed himself to the mysterious phenomenon of the common cold. After due deliberation he offered “rules for avoiding the common head cold,” among them:
• “Don ‘t breathe through your mouth or nose.
• “Avoid crowds. A good way to avoid crowds is to stay right in your room all day with the door locked.
• “Get plenty of sleep. If you feel drowsy at your work, just put your head over on your desk and take a little nap. Your boss will understand if you put a little sign up by your elbow reading: ‘Men asleep here, Cold prevention.’
• “Stay in a temperature of between 60 and 70 degrees. This can be done by jumping on board a train for Palm Beach and lying on the sand for a month or so.
• “Don’t dose up with patent medicines and nostrums, A sitz-bath of rock-and-rye twice a day ought to be all the medicinal treatment you will need.
• “Eat a balanced diet. No proteins, no starches, no carbohydrates. Just a good steak and lyonnaise potatoes and asparagus now and then during the day.
• “No exercise. Exercise just Stirs up the poisons in your system and makes you a hot-bed of disease, Sit, or lie, as still as possible and smoke constantly.
• “If you think you have caught a cold, call in a doctor. Call in three good doctors and play bridge.
• “And, above all, don’t catch cold.”
Benchley ‘s bits of wisdom were scarcely less practical than the cherished notions of cold prevention held by your grandmother—and by many physicians, for that matter— until fairly recently. Everyone swore by some pet theory about the causes of colds and some pet remedy for avoiding them. Most such ideas could be backed up with the testimonial of an individual who had not had a cold in 30 years. If the method did not work for the next person, it was probably the failure of the cold sufferer, not of the method. This did not address the treatment for blocked eustachian tubes, itchy nose and cough.
In 1966 a United States drug manufacturer listed the advice that Americans passed along to each other as cold gospel. Some of the remedies were daily regimens; others were to be taken at the first inkling of a cold: Eat an apple every night. Drink hot beer with camphor. Chew raw, seasoned peanuts. Eat garlic buds and vinegar pickles. Drink buttermilk and soda water. Sniff glycerin, rose water and myrrh. Wear an onion poultice. Visit a chiropractor. Avoid eating wheat or rye.
Home remedies for colds seem to have been even more fanciful. The Common Cold Unit in Salisbury, England, once catalogued the unsolicited suggestions it had received from helpful citizens. Advice to the unit’s scientists included the following recommendations for treating nose infections: Sniff pepper, snuff or cinnamon. Wash the inside of the nose with cod-liver oil, salt water, cream or glycerin. Inhale ammonia or eucalyptus vapors.
Prescriptions for preventive hygiene included: Get plenty of sunshine. Wash handkerchiefs with special detergents. Rub socks with onions daily. Expose the naked body to the cooling breezes of an electric fan for 15 minutes a day. Special diets to reduce the incidence of colds contained large doses of onion soup, garlic, carrots or hot lemonade; others banned salads in the fall and winter months. Among the miscellaneous treatments proposed were: Rub the body with petroleum jelly. Smoke tobacco several times a day. Wear a gas mask for an hour daily. Take up fencing. Grow a luxuriantly thick mustache. Stand on the head underwater. Rub naphtha spirits on the scalp. Practice mental concentration, especially on mathematics. This now became the standard treatment for blocked eustachian tubes, itchy nose and cough.
Unfortunately, virtually none of these curatives take into account the fact that viruses are what cause colds. Nor do the remedies allow for the reality that avoiding colds is largely a two-stage process: breaking the viral chain of transmission from one person’s respiratory tract to another’s, and keeping the body healthy enough to prevent viruses from prospering when they do show up. The first stage offers the better protection: Avoid the avoidable routes of viral transmission. This is simple in theory but difficult in practice with treatment for blocked eustachian tubes, itchy nose and cough. |
