I’m feeling much better now.
My trick for getting through these things is as follows:
1) The minute I feel myself getting sick, I start the Vitamin C front-loading: 2000mg per hour, with at least 4oz (preferably 8oz) of water per hour. I do this every hour on day 1, or until my urine turns yellow-green. At that point I know I’m just peeing away the C, so I cut the dose in half.
2) Zinc. It’s a metal, so I don’t take lots. I just make sure I get about double the RDA for day 1.
3) Rest. I nap as I need to. Hang work, I need to get THROUGH this.
4) On Day 2, depending on how I feel, I take 1000 mg of C per hour. Again, the urine check tells me when to cut the dose.
Often this method will allow me to skate on the surface of the cold, feeling “like I’m getting sick” for two to three days without actually getting SICK sick. Sometimes it knocks the cold back so hard I feel perfectly well by Day 2. In this most recent case, I felt great by about midnight. I’d only taken (only!) about 10,000 mg of C, at the staggered doses so that my body could assimilate it JIT-style, and I forgot about Zinc altogether, because I forgot.
Anyway, I feel great today. I’ve had a little extra caffeine to make sure I stay perky (caffeine is a medication, not a food additive as far as I’m concerned. Anything with caffeine in it is to be treated like medicine) and I’ve gotten lots done with only a 30-minute power-nap at 3:00pm.
–Howard
hmmm… I’ll have to try that when I get sick again… Or maybe tomorrow if the current one keeps up.
Wow. I’ve always trusted Vitamin C to help me when I’m sick, but never in that quantity! I assume you’re not screwing around with the buffered stuff? (Or do you need to to make sure that your system can actually use it?)
I’ll have to try that sometime. Unfortunately, my sicknesses tend to come on much more gradually…
Usually all I need to do is stop wearing shorts in the rain at night.
Heh, and I thought my 1000mg per day when sick was going overboard…
(I double my dose when I have a cold.)
(Now excuse me while I medicate myself with multiple 12oz cans of Coke.)
My parents use to jam vitamins down my throat every morning when I was growing up. I would literally gag on them when I swallowed them. My throat would close on the chalky vitamin C pills and get lodged there for 15 minutes, creating great pain until the pill dissolved. When I moved out and stopped taking the pills, I immediately felt better. I have had a stigma toward vitamin and mineral supplements ever since.
When I get sick, I drink fruit juice. Lots of juice.
That’s a good strategy. Next time I’m sick, I’ll try it out as an experiment. And I’ll try to get one of my idiot friends sick, as a control.
The girls and I are on a preventative dose of vitamin C (40mg) and echinacea (12.5 mg). When we start to feel sick then we up it to 80mg and 25mg or two gummi bears instead of one. Colds are gone within 3 days and no loss of school attendance.
do you think there’s any medical basis for this strategy?
There’s certainly empirical basis — It works for me.
The strategy was given to me by a nutritionist who almost certainly wanted to sell me lots of Vitamin C. Her thinking was that the body can only metabolize so much C at once, but that it metabolizes it very quickly and uses whatever it needs. According to research she paraphrased but did not cite directly, the body’s demand for C peaks at the onset of an illness, and tapers during the fight, with a maximum demand of up to 20,000 mg/day.
Before I started doing this, I would get sick EVERY TIME I traveled — even when taking C as a supplement. After I started doing this I was able to beat all but the most tenacious illnesses into submission in the first couple of days, provided I remembered to stay the course.
Yes, my experience could well be panacea-effect. Frankly, the less sick I am, the less I care how it works. 🙂
Panacea effect? I want some of that!
On a more serious note, I recall a researcher (wish I could recall the name and cite properly) who had set out to show the vitamin C treatment/preventative for colds was bunk. He did find that C didn’t prevent infection, but he did start taking C himself. Why? He found that it did lessen the severity of the infection, which is a pretty big win.