How to Cure Common Cold Symptoms, Article Review Example

Introduction

The term common cold is used to refer to a viral infection of the upper respiratory tract, the single most frequent condition in humans. The infection is alternatively called acute viral rhinopharyngitis, acute coryza or simply cold. The disease is contagious and is mainly caused by corona viruses and rhinoviruses as can be derived from the above listed names. Today, common cold has no cure or vaccine in conventional medicine. What can be treated and or curbed are such common symptoms as running nose, fever, sore throat etc. The common cold infection usually self delimits to a cycle of seven days, after which another bout of attack may accrue for up to three consecutive weeks. Adults can experience up to 4 annual infections while children will usually fall victim to the disease for up to 12 times annually.

Symptoms

The most prominent symptoms of common cold include a sore throat, frequent coughs, nasal congestion and running nose. These symptoms are mostly accompanied by muscle aches, poor appetite, general fatigue, the pink eye (conjunctivitis) and headaches. Common cold is usually denoted by a mild fever, the main reason why it features symptoms overlapping with those of influenza but for the severeness.

Patients at Diagnosis

Once a patient is diagnosed as suffering from common cold, there are particular feelings and sensations that are reported universally to physicians. These include a chilliness sensation whether fever is present or absent. They also experience uncomfortable breathing due to nasal congestion and mild but persistent headaches. A recent American study published in the Journal of medicine reported that 60% of common cold patients always report a sore, itchy throat characteristic of the upper respiratory tract’s infection.

Medications for common cold

As already noted in the introduction, common cold currently has no medications or even herbal remedies that can conclusively demonstrate to cure or prevent it. Conventional medicine has not even come close enough even to finding anything that can shorten the duration of common cold illnesses. What we have though, is treatment that targets the symptoms depicted and triggered by the infection. This is what medics call symptomatic support.

We thus have antibiotics to regulate and or eliminate the fever, the headaches, the sore muscles and the sore throats. Drugs with benzocaine, dyclonine hydrochloride, benzyl alcohol, hexylresorcinol, phenol compounds, menthol and salicyl alcohol are useful towards this end. For nasal congestion that is mostly caused by swelled mucous membranes in a patient’s nose, tropical and oral decongestants can help ease breathing. The medication in all the cases mentioned here are available in tablets, caplets, sprays and drops. Some precautionary remedies can also help prevent recurrence of common cold or at least reduce the frequency of attacks. Such include high doses of vitamin C from fruits like oranges and grapes. These only amplify the immunity and do not cure or prevent common cold proactively and directly, however. A good prevention strategy might be avoiding the inhalation of airborne mucus drops usually ejected when infected persons cough or sneeze nearby. Those airborne mucus drops carry with them the causative virus that can spread the disease easily.