I think the real racket is that people are taking medications to suppress cold symptoms in the first place. A healthy adult should be out no more than a week from a strong cold/flu. That wouldn't be a big deal except people get so little time off from work they don't want to waste it on a cold.
Wether they spend $10 on symptom suppressors or $50 is besides the point. Taking medications for what your body should be capable of handling with proper nutrition and rest cannot be healthy.
I'm an MD, and I used to avoid treating cold symptoms for these exact reasons, until I came down with a nasty sinus infection that was a complication of my cold virus. Basically, because I left my sinuses all stuffed up, I created a nidus for infection -- ie the perfect environment for bacteria to breed -- so I had a cold for a week, and then I had a bacterial sinusitis for another 2 weeks and finally broke down to take antibiotics. I could have avoided the sinus infection (and the antibiotics to tamp it down) if I'd just taken a decongestant when I had the cold. And the side benefit is my cold would have felt less miserable, too. And it wasn't about not taking time off from work because a lot of this was during a vacation anyway.
Point is, treating cold symptoms can actually prevent complications, so it's not all bad.
In general all these cold and flu medications do is suppress your immune response, which is obviously not the smartest thing to do. You might get rid of some symptoms, but you're also hindering your body from actually getting rid of the infection.
The article above does say that in adults decongestants might be helpful. I think you need to know when it's a good idea to "help" your body treat the infection, and when you're just treating the symptoms and just hindering it. Most people just want rid of the symptoms.
In general all these cold and flu medications do is suppress your immune response
That's not true at all. Over the counter cold formulations contain one of four products: decongestant, cough suppressant, pain reliever and antihistamine.
None of those suppress your immune system.
EDIT: I think know what you meant now. You mean your immune system reacts to a cold by making you cough and the drugs suppress your cough (thus your immune response)? In that case, I see your point.
Yes, they are. Also, I believe most pain medications (apart from opioids) work by knocking out some part of the immune response.
Now, even assuming that the medication doesn't actually interfere with your immune system and just gets rid of the symptoms and makes you feel great, you should be aware that your immune system deliberately makes you feel crappy ("sickness behaviour") so that you'll rest and give your immune system a chance to kill the infection. This is more an issue with the flu rather than the cold.
I think what threw me off is the use of the word "immune suppression". That word has a specific meaning when referring to drugs and tends to refer to drugs that to interrupt immune response far upstream. These drugs have severe side effects as your body can't fight invading viruses and bacteria.
I think the difference with cold remedies is that they tend to interfere with immune responses that are far downstream that tend to be more symptomatic, rather than major mechanisms by which the body's immune system works.
I'm just one data point, but my children usually suffer pretty badly when they have colds. I teach them that you can't fight the cold, but you can make it more comfortable to sleep (which goes a long way towards fighting the cold).
I give Acetaminophen/Paracetamol/Tylenol for pain, and a mucogenic (Guifanesin or the much better Mucosolvan/Ambroxol if I can get it from Europe) to thin out the mucus secretions.
It goes against instinct but making more mucus keeps it from building up and turning into that gunk that starts sinus/ear infections and never gets out of your lungs once the cold has passed.
I really wish Ambroxol would be approved in the USA, but apparently it's too old of a molecule to successfully recoup the FDA approval expenses.
Yes and certain foods can also be used to reduce symptoms, but of course they're not as powerful. Did that option fail for you?
The case I see more often is people get obvious cold symptoms and are back at work the next day. Thanks to symptom reducers they don't have to rest or eat properly for the condition, so their light symptoms persist for weeks. That also leads to complications.
Also I should have mentioned that most adults are not healthy and don't eat healthy to begin with, which creates a ripe market for band aid medications.
My original point was taking medications to suppress symptoms. For example they'll open your sinuses in 5 minutes and keep them open for hours.
Typically food will reduce symptoms by stimulating the immune system to work faster. Attempts at immediate relief will be short lived. That's how people traditionally treated disease. It's still a valid approach for light ailments where modern medicine can be a harmful crutch.
>>Taking medications for what your body should be capable of handling with proper nutrition and rest cannot be healthy.
Could you explain a bit more as I can think of a case where this seems to be false: While my child's body can eventually handle colds and flus, if his temperature goes above a certain level there's a significant chance for brain-damage, so I counteract the bodies natural fever with medication.
I'm no medical professional so take my statements with healthy skepticism, do your own research, etc, but as a father myself I share the concern and my understanding was that common viral infections like the flu, common colds, ear/throat/sinus infections, whatever, do not cause dangerous fevers (>105ºF). Your temperature regulation usually has to be impaired in some other way like being in hot conditions, overexertion, or a combination of them. Obviously in infants the story is different due to physiological immaturity but the fever response to infection is a positive indicator of the body's thermal regulation working correctly and treating a fever is simply for symptom relief and possibly even detrimental to treating the illness.
"what your body should be capable of handling with proper ... rest"
Which sets up a glorious chicken and egg where due to the peculiar anatomy of my sinuses or whatever, I find it nearly impossible to rest without some form of cold medicine. By the end of a simple cold, I'm really looking forward to finally getting a decent nights sleep and not feeling miserable when I'm sitting around.
Got a cold-like thing that turned into bronchitis a few weeks before my wedding. Still had it during my honeymoon a couple weeks later and lingering symptoms for a couple more months afterwards. With the veritable arsenal of meds I had, I barely scraped by and with no ER visits even after waking up most nights of the week for a couple weeks with asthma attacks at its worst. Wooo. Not something I'd wish on my worst enemy. I'm amazed I did what I did given how tired and shitty I felt despite everything. Feeling sick really sucks.
Ate well, exercised regularly, actually just straight up stopped working for other reasons so I had plenty of time to rest. < for parent commenter who seems to care about such things.
Cold symptoms are mostly an immune overreaction. The way the body responds is very much suboptimal. Just because we (usually) recover on our own doesn't mean medicine is bad.
What, you think I actually know something about medicine just because I act like I do?
Ahem. Anyway, here's what Wikipedia has to say:
"The symptoms of the common cold are believed to be primarily related to the immune response to the virus. The mechanism of this immune response is virus specific. For example, the rhinovirus is typically acquired by direct contact; it binds to human ICAM-1 receptors through unknown mechanisms to trigger the release of inflammatory mediators. These inflammatory mediators then produce the symptoms."
Wikipedia may not be any more reliable than me, but at least it's something. Unfortunately it looks like the cited paper is behind a paywall.
Yes, the symptoms are primarily the immune response. Hence my point that it's probably not smart to interfere with the immune response just because you don't like the symptoms. The immune response is the only thing that will actually get rid of the virus. That sentence from wikipedia doesn't mention anything about an "overreaction".
Well excuse me for not reading your mind as to what you meant by "that." :P
I'm not aware of anything that shows that people who take medications to alleviate symptoms take longer to recover than those who don't, while they're often more comfortable in the meantime. That seems sufficient to establish "overreaction."
Wow, would you really not spend $50 to avoid a week's worth of cold symptoms? Sounds like a bargain to me, even just for the improved enjoyment of the after-working-hours time.
Wether they spend $10 on symptom suppressors or $50 is besides the point. Taking medications for what your body should be capable of handling with proper nutrition and rest cannot be healthy.