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Wellness Wednesday for February 22, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Question: nasal irrigation with a appropriately diluted betadine solution, very bad idea or shouldn't be harmful if done right ?

Background:

Have something I suspect is covid. Combination of very sore throat, coughing and low grade fever - same as the last time.

Not such a big deal, some fever but not very high.

Sore throat no longer that sore.

I was surprised at the bits of phlegm I kept coughing up yesterday. It was not a blob, almost a chunk.

It's getting tiresome so I'm considering stricter measures. Anyone has experience with anything related? Gargling, nasal irrigation as a way of getting rid of upper airways infections ?

Not sure about the betadine, but I've been doing saltwater whenever I have a cold for some time, and it seems to prevent them from lingering. I can't remember if I bothered when I had covid, because it was pretty mild and didn't seem inclined to linger, but probably -- because it seems beneficial with the colds to get on it at the first sign of feeling crummy.

There was a study on this for covid, which has some issues but seemed promising; didn't seem to show an additional benefit to adding iodine to the salt rinse tho:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.16.21262044v1.full

Small study for colds, there are others out there I'm sure:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-37703-3

I usually do something like this: (but without the fancy pot, I just put the rinse in a shallow dish and snort it, holding it in my sinus as long as possible)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2778074/

I am not a doctor, but this is part of the treat protocol crafted by my doctor: I've gargled with cetylpyridinium chloride mouthwash and used a 1% providone-iodine solution nasal spray multiple times a day for a viral respiratory infection and I've had good results. At the very least, I've never been harmed by it.

I also eat spoonfulls of honey multiple times a day to sooth my throat (and has other benefits).

Fortunately, I've never gotten covid that I'm aware of so I cannot comment on the results with covid specifically. As always though, starting treatments earlier is generally better. Waiting until you're tired of it is generally a bad approach.