Imagine you’re having one of those awful days. You’re on a business trip you really did not want to take, and you’re dead tired from the travel and other hassles, including that hotel room fire alarm that blasted you upright at 4:00 in the morning. And now you find you’re going to have to spend another day in that dreary town to clean up the messes you walked into at your daylong meeting.
And on top of that, it’s cold and raining, and in your haste you forgot to bring an umbrella. So you’re angry and anxious and frustrated, and totally exhausted. And when you finally get back to your hotel room where you’re hoping to finally get some much needed rest, you suddenly realize that on top of everything else, you’ve developed a cold. Great! Just what you needed.
Does any of this sound familiar? It probably does. Because at one time or another the vast majority of us have experienced the misery of a cold. And that isn’t just a personal misfortune. Because it’s estimated that the cost of colds in the United States alone, due to lost work time, doctor visits and treatment, are in the order of $40 billion annually.
But how does this happen? How exactly do we catch the colds that cause so much misery? And why is it that some people never get seem to them?
These are indeed questions for the ages, since it seems the common cold has been with us forever. Even the oldest medical text in existence, the Egyptian Ebers papyrus, which goes back well over three thousand years to the 16th century BCE, describes symptoms and treatment for the common cold. And throughout antiquity and right up through the modern age of medicine, scientists have continued to search for the secrets to this surprisingly mysterious illness.
So what have we learned in all that time and effort? It turns out, not much. In fact, if the National Institutes of Health is to be believed, the most effective way to prevent colds may be gargling with water.
None the less, by far the most extensive research effort of modern medicine was conducted at the Common Cold Unit in Salisbury, England – the sprawling 14 acre medical facility whose sole purpose was finding cures and preventative measures for the common cold. Yet even that massive, sustained effort did not result in any practical medical treatment. At least, that is the upshot of a detailed exposé by Mike Stone of the
, which describes its 40+ year history.In that article, Stone describes, often in great detail, their failed attempts at finding a cause and cure for colds. And those failures were mainly a result of their inability to infect their volunteer subjects with colds. To that end the study’s investigative team attempted a wide variety of approaches to infecting their healthy subjects, everything from forcing them to stay outside in the cold and wet, to having infected patients kiss healthy ones.
But their primary approach was introducing various strains of cold virus directly into their subjects’ nasal passages. All of which proved surprisingly futile. So much so that at one point, frustrated by their inability to cause colds in a clinical environment, the researchers decided to try infecting their volunteers the natural way. So they selected a group of individuals who had developed “wild colds” and sent them to be housed with a group of healthy subjects. But even after the sick patients sneezed and coughed for days on end in the presence of their potential victims, not to mention liberally spreading their “nasal discharge” on everything from playing cards to cutlery, no new colds developed.
In fact in reading Stone’s lengthy report, it appears that in its more than four decades of effort, the CCU may have produced more false “nocebo effect” colds than real ones – the volunteers being so eager to please the doctors conducting the study. Or as one of the lead researchers was reported to have said to his colleague in a moment of irritation, “You shouldn’t be interested in why volunteers who were given cold viruses get colds, but why so many of them didn’t.”
Admittedly the author of that piece, Mike Stone, is a virus denier – which I am not. But in spite of my belief in the general culpability of viruses, I have not been able to find any research that rebuts the data in Stone’s article. Nor was I able to find anything that documented in any remotely conclusive way the role of viruses in cold infections, or how colds are caught and transmitted from one person to another. In fact, I was not able to find any proof that that can actually occur. Instead, most of what I found in the medical literature was based on little more than a general assumption – that viruses are what cause colds, and are therefore what causes them to spread – with little more than supposition and speculation to back that up.
That lack of scientific veracity has not turned me into a virus denier. But it has made me want to look more deeply into the cause of colds. Because while I have no reason to doubt that viruses cause other diseases, such as AIDS, Covid and the flu – after surveying the available material, it appears to me that the common cold may be the exception that proves the rule.
After all, imagine the effect of forcing a dozen healthy individuals to be subjected to several days of coughing and sneezing by sick Covid patients in close quarters, as the British study did with colds. My guess is that nearly all of the healthy subjects would become sick. And without any kind of intervention, one or two of them might even die. Yet none of the healthy subjects in the CCU study caught colds. And those who supposedly caught respiratory infections by the other methods used throughout the study, were likely caused by the intervention itself rather than the virus, in a manner I will describe shortly.
So what can generally be said about how colds happen?
Well in general terms, they seem to occur in the kind of situation I describe in the scenario at the beginning of this post – the most important factor being exhaustion. And the first sign of a cold seems to be a raw area of soreness developing at the back of the nasal cavity.
So how exactly does a cold happen?
Maybe the best way to answer that question is to go back to that story, and have a closer look at the process as it develops.
So once again, here’s the situation – you’re having a terrible day, you’re tired, you’re stressed, you’re aggravated and maybe even a little angry. And as a result, you may not be in the mood to notice some of the more subtle changes taking place within your body. But if you were more sensitive to those changes, you would likely have noticed a certain rawness starting to develop at the back of your nasal cavity, just below the sphenoid sinus – the area shown in red in the image below.
It’s a spot that feels as though it’s above the back of the throat. And as you can see in the illustration, that is generally speaking where it’s located.
In any case, assuming you were able to notice these changes, here’s how it would likely play out.
As you notice the soreness in that area, you also begin to realize there’s something different about the way you’re breathing. Your breath is somehow more shallow, and seems of shorter duration. And you sense that that breathing pattern is the result of your general sense of fatigue, stress and aggravation.
And as you focus in on your breathing, you realize it’s almost as though you’re snorting, which in turn causes your breathing to be harsher. And because of that, the force of your breath seems to be aggravating that sore spot at the back of your nasal passage.
And as you notice this, you also realize your swallowing is not quite right either. And you sense that that is likely because of the tension you’re feeling in your throat, which also seems to be a result of stress. And that manner of swallowing seems to be aggravating that same sore spot. And as you take all this in, you also begin to realize that that area of soreness is where your colds always seem to start.
Then suddenly it hits you – what you’re doing in all your anger, fatigue and frustration – is giving yourself a cold.
So your next thought becomes, how can I stop that from happening?
That question forces you to step back a moment to consider your options. And as you do that, you remember it’s your exhaustion and tension and general frame of mind that is causing all of this to happen. So that tells you the first thing you need to do is try to relax. And furthermore, you need to do that in a way that takes the stress off of your nasal passage, and in particular that sore area that’s becoming increasingly raw. So that becomes your litmus test, your way of gauging whether you’re having a positive impact on preventing your nascent cold.
And as you do that over the next few minutes, and as you feel your breathing and swallowing having less of an impact on your nasal passage, you begin to realize that the soreness has become less raw. And after an hour or so, you notice that the rawness is more or less gone. And before long, you realize you’ve prevented yourself from getting a cold.
And when you get a chance to sit back and think about it, you realize that was all there was to it. That was how your colds always start. And that is how you prevent yourself from getting them.
Though at this point, I would personally add – based on the experience of myself and others – it’s a little harder to do than it may sound. Some people, once they learn of the process, seem able to suddenly prevent colds. For them the preventative process seems just as natural as the process that causes them – while others have to endure a few episodes before they can fully get the hang of it. But generally speaking, if you know you’re breathing in a hash and damaging way, you can usually halt that process, certainly to the point where you can lessen the severity of your cold. Though it can be a challenge.
For example, one day awhile back a friend of mine told me she had a cold. And after learning of the process I just described, she nodded and said yes, she’d had that kind of experience. And she agreed that that may have been what had given her the cold. But when she told me a few months later that she had another cold – before I even had a chance to ask her, she said, “And yes, it was one of those days,” in a rather irritated and exasperated voice.
Which is all to say that just because you know about the process, doesn’t mean you can prevent it from happening. But it is a start. The main problem being, that when you’re in that kind of mood, you’re generally not in any shape to notice slight changes in your breathing. But that’s what does it.
Now at this point, I’m guessing there are doctors and others out there who are saying to themselves, “What about rhinoviruses, and other pathogens that are ‘known’ to cause colds.”
To that, my response is this: To date 200 different strains of viruses have been found that are thought to cause colds – not 200 virus mutations – 200 types of viruses; coronaviruses, rhinoviruses etc. And to me, that suggests those viruses are not the cause of colds, but instead have some role in their progress. It seems likely those viruses thrive in an environment where there is a lot of mucus and phlegm. And as a result, they become massively more numerous when we have a cold. In fact there is some evidence that they may be part of the process that causes that mucus to develop, which is the body’s way of soothing and healing that soreness.
Also, if viruses cause colds the way they cause so many other diseases, then why, with so many different kinds of viruses, is every cold we get essentially the same. Sure, some episodes may be more severe than others or have different durations. But they all start the same way in terms of their initial symptoms, and then develop in essentially the same way throughout.
And if viruses cause colds the way they cause flus and other viral infections, then why do we not have cold pandemics, or even local cold outbreaks, where the “R1H6” rhinovirus is going around? If a cold was a disease caused by a contagious pathogen, wouldn’t that be the pattern? But it clearly is not.
And the reason the cold season happens to coincide with the winter flu season, is not because of spending more time indoors, as is likely the case with the flu, but because of the much drier air cold weather brings, which in turn means that our throats and nasal passages are more easily irritated, causing the kind of rawness in the nasal passage that leads to colds.
Similarly, that is likely why 15-33% of the volunteers in the British study who had viruses sprayed into their noses were (rather subjectively) deemed to have colds, as were 10% of the control group – and why that effect was not repeatable in any consistent or practical way. In retrospect, that was likely because the spraying process irritated the subjects’ nasal passages in a way that closely mirrors the natural process that was described here. Also, those volunteers were subjected to regular testing of their nasal discharge and other symptomatic developments. Think Covid testing on an ongoing basis – possibly hourly. If there is anything that is going to irritate your nasal passage, that would be it.
Now at this point, I feel the need to acknowledge a rather obvious fact – that reading an article like this one is not likely to convince most readers of the veracity of this radical departure from conventional wisdom. On the other hand, it must be asked, where has that “wisdom” gotten us? What has standard medical practice, as developed over thousands of years, done for our understanding and treatment of colds?
Nothing, as far as I can tell. And that should tell us something about our current beliefs. If that understanding was anywhere near useful, wouldn’t modern medicine have eventually found something conclusive about what causes colds and how to prevent them? That should be especially true for a disease that is so common and widespread. So why has medical science found nothing to prevent colds from happening, and very little to diminish their severity?
Sure, we all have our favorite curatives, the ones we swear by, from chicken soup to heating pads. But in a way, that only goes to show their overall ineffectiveness. If any of them actually provided a real cure or prevention, don’t you think we’d know it by now? I sure think so.
But it isn’t my opinion that ultimately matters here. It’s what you think that counts. And I can understand why you would be skeptical of what you’ve just been reading. And to me the answer to that understandable skepticism, is to wait until you get a cold. And when that happens, take another look at this article and then decide to what degree it describes your cold. Because my history with this tells me it is only when you are in the grip of a cold, or have recently had one, that you are able to recognize the similarities between your own experience and the scenario described here.
Which is why this is more than just a post. In fact, what we’re doing here is something of an experiment, or at least a data gathering exercise.
So if you’ve caught a cold recently, and have a fairly clear memory of the events leading up to it, please click the link below. That will take you to a brief survey, which will allow you to quickly document the relevant events surrounding your cold.
Also, if you know of someone who has a cold or who’s recently had one, please share this post with them. Or if you have a Substack or blog or other type of publication, I invite you to link to this post, or cross-post it.
A lot of readers are going to need to see this, if we’re going to gather enough data from cold sufferers to determine the relevance of what’s presented here. So your help in spreading the word will be invaluable and greatly appreciated.
And one final thing. If you do get a cold, try to remember that it’s just your body telling you that you need to slow down for awhile and take a break from the stresses of life. And when you think about it, that’s quite a marvelous tool we’ve inherited. And given how long colds have been around, it’s likely that even our biological ancestors suffered from this self-inflicted disease. Which means that throughout millennia, generation after generation have passed along this amazing negative feedback loop.
And it’s one that operates much like the governor of an engine, which will slow that engine down if it begins to run too fast. I’m not sure how common governors are in commercial vehicles. But I once had a car, a Saturn SC1, which I loved. But whenever I tried to see how fast it would go on the newly resurfaced quite country road I lived on, the gas pedal would disengage once I reached around 110 MPH. And I couldn’t get it to go any faster, even though I knew there was more juice in the engine. All of which likely kept me from killing myself or someone else – or perhaps blowing the engine. So even then, I could more or less see it as a good thing.
Which is just another way of saying that if you understand the process outlined here, and are able to bring it into effect in a way that keeps your colds from happening, please do yourself a favor and listen to the advice your body is giving you. Take it easy for awhile, and try to give yourself a much needed break.
For more adventuresome reading, check out my novel. And tell your friends.
The Contrarian Candidate is a high-stakes political thriller about our fraught and turbulent times - and how to undermine and defeat an unapologetic narcissist like Donald Trump.
Bartholomew St. James is a one-time political operative who’s turned his talents to reporting on the politics of our day. And he’s done it with fiction, because he feels that’s the best way to tell the story of a deeply divided nation and the challenges that presents.
He’s also the author of The Progressive Contrarian on Substack: Providing common sense answers to complex questions, by seeing the world through contrarian eyes.