The recommended doseage was 1-a-day, and I took 2.

I was VERY surprised when within about 15 minutes the symptons all but vanished and I was feeling hugely better … about 2 hours later the effects wore off and I was feeling very rough again … so I took another 2 tablets .. and the symptoms were gone again.

I would like to point out that I did check the effect of taking such a high dose of Vit-C and over the short term my understanding was that if you take too much Vit-C the biggest effect to worry about is the laxative effect :O) … over the long term there are other problems … but I only had the cold for about a week (I guess it didn’t reduce the actual length of the cold any)

Unfortunately, the year later Boots were nolonger doing the tablets, and the standard Vit-C without the Bioflavaniods just didn’t work the same, so I was back to suffering along like everyone else.

Gothgirl, you have it right, a few years ago I was working backstage for a play when I went down with the Flu 2 days before curtain-up and I was the only person who could run the sound-desk … a friend told me that if I felt up to actually doing it, so long as I coughed into a hanky, rather than spreading my joy around ;O), then no-one else would get it … sure enough it was spot on advice … on-one else did get ill.

However, my school is currently experiencing a lot of staff absence (which is perfectly expected given the time of year and the fact we have daily contact with 1000 students who are coughing and sneezing their germs all over us). However, a directive from the school assures us that it is nothing a little vitamin C won’t cure, and has procured a supply of high strength pills, at school (and thus taxpayer) expense, for us all to take to prevent colds and even swine flu.

Far be it from me to point out the problem with this plan, but the fact that my disease prevention plan (having the children sneeze into tissues and wash their hands occasionally) was rubbished as being ‘impractical’ has me particularly riled. I can only hope that there is a placebo benefit from this regimen.

What is the world coming to when science teachers don’t know a baseless marketing ploy when they see one.

It isn’t though; it’s good old regression to the mean. If you punish a late child, the punishment will seem to work when it regresses to an earlier time. If you reward an early child, the reward will seem to have been counterproductive when it regresses to a later time.

This is a very generally applicable lesson in why praising and rewarding children (and adults) is a better idea than experience suggests, and punishing and censuring them a worse one.

I’m a vet and probably about to astound you with my ignorance. We are the ‘poor relations’ of the the medics and our clinical trails are always small. I’ve always consoled myself by saying that it’s difficult to achieve a statistically significant result with a small sample size.If, therefore there is such a result then there must have been a large difference in outcome between the two groups and I can trust the results. If this isn’t true I’m going to give up on ‘evidence-based veterinary medicine’ and become a homeopath.

However, just imagine if you will that this had been a well designed, double blind placebo controlled clinical trial returning a statistically significant result (p

Frederick Robert Klenner, B.S., M.S., M.D., F.C.C.P., A.A.F.P. (Spring 1974). “Significance of High Daily Intake of Ascorbic Acid in Preventive Medicine”. Journal of the International Academy of Preventive Medicine, Spring 1974, Volume 1, Number 1, pp. 45-69.

www.seanet.com/~alexs/ascorbate/197x/klenner-fr-j_int_assn_prev_med-1974-v1-n1-p45.htm

Funniest of all though has to be this (ibid.), “Lightning victims can also be saved. I have done it.”

Seems like Cardiff trying to fluff up their PR rating and nothing more.

“Claire Johnson and Ronald Eccles, Acute cooling of the feet and the onset of common cold symptoms Fam. Pract., December 2005; 22: 608 – 613.”

“Half of the participants immersed their feet in bowls of ice-cold water for 20 minutes. The others sat with their feet in empty bowls”

I think this is an attempt at placebo. I haven’t read the original paper, but the report doesn’t fill me with confidence.

And meanwhile, further alarming and questionable advice about colds. (Once a correspondent to the Guardian’s “Notes and Queries” explained with superficial sanity that fax machines, the thing of the day, had the practical drawback that the secret GCHQ office received a copy of everything sent by any fax machine in the country. So much paper…) Heating your bedroom is a nice idea, don’t use central heating, a little electric heater and enough ventilation so you don’t suffocate. I can’t sit naked and read in my bedroom at 3 am because the light’s off. But paracetamol makes the cold longer? Nasty thought there. It does, however, make it more bearable. Perhaps that’s the problem, dose yourself and go to work and get stressed, or don’t dose and spend the day watching TV from your bed, much healthier. Regardless, as this article explains, you -will- get better, unless it’s bird flu after all. Drugging up to -feel- better seem completely reasonable to me, and doesn’t it stand to reason that if you pharmacise your closed sinuses open again, they’re less likely to go nastier still? Maybe not?

As for Squander Two’s idea: of course the best way to recover from a cold is to go to bed for 2 days and do nothing (have somebody look after you).
Compare women with small children, who catch “a cold” in September and can’t shake “it” off until May – that’s because they can’t just stop, they catch every bug from their kids and they are sleep-deprived because they are looking after everybody else at night. Nobody offers them a gold star for it (sorry Ben), and the doctor will just shrug his shoulders, oh, it’s part of having a family, there is nothing you can do.
Enter the alternative therapists.

It’s at times like these when we need a doctor to explain it to us. If only there were one on this site…

I’m of the bigjohn756 school of medicine by the way……

I very rarely get the kind of colds that would prevent me from going to work these days but have been a slave to hideous chest infections, Not sure how that will transpire now that I have a diagnosis (and medication for) asthma.