The average person catches two to four colds a year, which means most of us will suffer through roughly 200 colds in our lifetime. With so many snotty struggles ahead of us each year, what remedies can we rely on to help us feel better fast? And do any of those viral cold cures we’ve seen online actually work? That’s what we — Raj Punjabi and Noah Michelson, the co-hosts of HuffPost’s “Am I Doing It Wrong?” podcast — recently asked Dr. Natasha Bhuyan, a family physician and medical director of OneMedical.
Listen to the full episode here. “I have patients ask me all the time about [unusual] cold cures because they want to get better fast,” Dr. Bhuyan said.
“One of the things I’ve heard about recently is garlic cloves up the nose. I think it’s this idea of garlic cloves acting as a decongestant. Garlic cloves up the nose can actually be really dangerous and can really irritate your nasal passages.
” Other unorthodox remedies she’s encountered involve an unexpected article of clothing. “The other things I’ve heard about have always been related to socks,” she revealed. “One [“remedy”] is go to bed wearing wet socks.
The other is put sliced up potatoes inside your socks and go to bed. It’s this thought that it’ll pull the cold virus into your feet and out of your body.” Despite how popular these so-called “treatments” may be, there’s no evidence that any of them work.
“Some of these ‘remedies,’ at best, you laugh at them, b.
