My colds almost always start with a bad headache and/or sore throat. As soon as I experience these symptoms, I pop one multi-vitamin, 1000 mg of vitamin C, 125 mg of echinacea, and drink a cup of Chun Chun Fever & Flu Tea with a big dollop of honey to mask the nasty taste. I ask Marv to do the same as a preventive measure (all except the foul tea). And as long as the sore throat persists, I drink hot honey and lime (they don’t have yellow lemons in Vietnam). I went through this routine three weeks ago, but I still had to suffer through a week of sinus cold.

As it turns out, at least one of my remedies doesn’t make a whit of difference. A recent study shows that echinacea doesn’t prevent or alleviate the common cold. (San Francisco Chronicle, July 28, 2005) There was no difference between the people who took echinacea (300 mg, 3 times a day) and those who took a placebo - no differences in probability of developing a cold, severity of symptoms, viral load in nasal secretions, or interleukin-8, an immune system protein.

Despite these results, other experts are claiming that echinacea could still be effective because other parts of the echinacea plant weren’t studied and the dosages were too low. Echinacea has long been used in naturopathic medicine and the World Health Organization even recommended it as a cold treatment in 1999.

I’ve also tried zinc lozenges when it was being touted in the news in the late 90’s. Not only did they not work, they tasted and smelled awful. Before we moved to bird-flu-central Vietnam, I always cooked a big pot of chicken soup from scratch and that helped make my sensitive tummy feel better. Oprah talked about Airborne last year, but I’ve never had the chance to try it. Maybe I’ll stock up on some next time I’m in the U.S.

Do you have a favorite cold/flu remedy?