Grandmother Knew Best

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In 1976, Tom Ferguson—then a fourth-year medical student at Yale—launched a magazine called Medical Self-Care . . . which—he hoped—would serve as "a Whole Earth Catalog of the best medical books, tools, and resources".

Tom spoke of his plans for the publication—and of his conviction that self-care could raise the general level of health in this country and lower our inflated levels of medical spending-in the Plowboy Interview in MOTHER NO. 51 . . . and left no doubt that he would work toward making those "dreams"come true.

Well, Tom Ferguson is Doctor Ferguson now, and the medical self-care "movement"—as well as Tom's magazine—has flourished. People are beginning to assume more responsibility for their own well-being and are eager for information that will help them take better care of their bodies.

So—in an effort to provide just such very necessary data—THE MOTHER EARTH NEWS® offers as a regular feature a piece by Tom Ferguson, M.D., entitled (what else?) "Medical SelfCare".

Grandmother Knew Best

For generations, grandmothers have been prescribing a standard set of remedies for the common cold: Get into bed, bundle up, drink plenty of hot liquids, and take cod liver oil and garlic. In the last 30 years, though, with the advent of high-technology medicine and socalled "wonder drugs", Grandma's home remedies have come to be viewed as little more than superstitious vestiges of the medical Dark Ages.

However, while modern science hasn't cured the common cold, it has improved our understanding of how viruses affect the body. And new knowledge points to two surprising conclusions about the nation's most infectious disease: Grandma's home remedies work . . . and most over-the-counter cold preparations often do more harm than good!

To understand these two somewhat surprising discoveries, let's look at the life cycle of the typical cold. You don't "catch" a cold in the sense that your normally virus-free body suddenly becomes overwhelmed by a virulent horde of invading microbes. Cold viruses are with us all the time. They live in the healthy mouth, sinuses, and throat tissues which usually protect the body from attack by viruses. Such tissues are covered with microscopic hairs, known as cilia, and a thin blanket of mucus. The moist mucus traps the virus particles, and its mildly acidic chemical composition impedes their reproduction long enough for the cilia to sweep them into the stomach . . . where digestive acids kill them.

Events that typically precede a cold—such as fatigue, stress, overwork, lack of sleep, anxiety, personal problems, poor diet, or exposure to cold—upset this delicate ecology and leave the throat drier, less acidic, and a trifle cooler. Such changes allow virus particles to penetrate the mucus layer, invade throat cells, and reproduce. Curing a cold, therefore, doesn't involve "eradicating cold germs" . . . because they live inside us and cannot be eliminated. Curing a cold means restoring the balance of forces that should have prevented the viruses from reproducing in the first place. And, strange as it may seem, cold symptoms actually work toward reestablishing that balance.