How to Treat a Cold

Video Transcript

"You have a pesky cold, and you are wondering how to get rid of it quicker. My name is Beverly Bitterman ARNP health and wellness consultant. Now I have a few tips and strategies for you. The thing about a cold is it's a virus and most of them are gone in about seven days, some a little shorter some a little longer. There are a few things that you can do to make yourself feel better and possibly to speed it up. However, nothing has been shown to make that cold go away in a day or two if it's really in there to stay. So here's some things to think about, one thing is to make sure that you get plenty of water if you have a cold. Likely you've got a stuffy nose, and you are breathing a lot through your mouth so you are losing more fluids. So you want to make sure that you drink plenty of water. The next thing you want to do is see what can you do to open up your nasal passages so that you can breath more easily and most importantly so that you can sleep. There are a couple of ways that you can do that. You can do it quite naturally with things like eating chicken noodle soup, and it's both the ingredients in the soup and the heat that's helpful so other hot liquids are also good. Sometimes something like ginger, taking a slice of a ginger root and steeping it in hot water is one of my favorite remedies. Putting a little lemon juice in that can also be helpful or you might prefer to have a hot lemonade. Lemon juice and sugar or lemon juice and honey those kinds of things can help open you up and make you feel better. You may wish to go to the drugstore and get a decongestant, something like Sudafed that would open up your nasal passages and make it easy to breath and reduce the likelihood that you'll get quite as much coughing. Nasal sprays are helpful, the disclaimer here is that you don't want to use it for more then three days. Trust me I know you can get addicted to the stuff and then you stay stuffy even after the cold is gone. There are some herbs, echinacea, vitamin C and zinc that are thought to be helpful, it's not definitively proven, they certainly wouldn't hurt you to take it. Give yourself a little extra rest, a little tlc and hopefully that cold will be gone before you know it. My name is Beverly Bitterman ARNP health and wellness consultant."