So here are some things I've tried with me and my family that don't seem to have worked:
- Getting rid of a cold sooner with melatonin. While the melatonin helped the sick people fall asleep, it didn't seem to shorten the duration of the cold noticeably.
- Weight control by increasing the amount of catalase in our diet. While oxidative stress, diabetes, and weight issues go hand-in-hand, simply increasing catalase in the diet didn't seem to help me or my one child who struggles with weight.
- Weight control by eating dessert before the main dish. This one was a long shot, but it was fun and odd to eat dessert out of order for a week or two.
- Neti pot for sinus infections. I haven't used my neti pot for over five years because it made my head feel waterlogged and didn't help much (if at all) with the underlying sinus complaint.
And here are some things I've tried that do seem to have a beneficial effect:
- Chewable vitamin C for avoiding colds. Like the doctor who recently discovered that intravenous ascorbic acid can help cure sepsis (http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/03/23/521096488/doctor-turns-up-possible-treatment-for-deadly-sepsis), I reasoned that ascorbic acid might be more effective if directly delivered to where it's needed rather than relying only on absorption via the digestive system and subsequent transport throughout the entire body. Chewed vitamins get aerosolized to a small degree and so can be carried by breathing to other locations within the respiratory tract. After one bad week of colds at the beginning of this school year, I bought a 500 tablet container of chewable vitamin C and now we regularly give one tablet to family members if they sneeze. No one has come down with a cold since we started doing that. But we are only in October....
- Oral exposure to pomegranate juice/powder in order to kill flu viruses. This one I'm less confident of, but the two times I've tried it for possible incipient flu infections, it seems to have been beneficial. The reason I think it might work is the pomegranate compound punicalagin, which has been observed in vitro to have a significant effect in inhibiting influenza virus replication. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19586764)
- Avoiding sinus headaches by manually moving the upper nasal tissues around. Snot apparently causes sinus issues. (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/07/050730100344.htm) I got the idea to try massage a couple of months ago from this website--http://www.wikihow.com/Massage-Your-Sinuses--which told of a "nose rub" technique to help sinuses drain. The women in my family tend to have narrow noses with sinuses that too often stop up, so why not do something that addresses snot buildup in our particular nose structure? Doing the "nose rub" as described on the website made me feel like little Tabitha on the show "Bewitched," just wiggling my nose tip back and forth; so instead when I feel a little sinus congestion starting, I stick my thumb up each nostril in turn and using my index and middle fingers to grip the outside of my nose, I move the upper tissues of my nose in a few circles in both directions. It works to help my sinuses drain themselves. Usually I experience at least one really bad sinus headache each month, but this last month I was able to avoid getting a sinus headache. I caution anyone who tries this to 1) have clipped, smooth thumbnails and 2) don't do it in public. :)
- Avoiding heme overdosing in order to not have restless legs syndrome. I'm not prone to RLS, but I did seem accidentally to give it to myself by eating around 2 dozen+ canned oysters, which are high in heme. (https://petticoatgovernment.blogspot.com/2017/09/oyster-heme-possible-rls.html) Not eating additional high doses of heme--plus possibly the hydroxocobalamin and ascorbic acid I took the next day--appears to have been efficacious in limiting my RLS episode to just one night.
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