DRMacIver's Notebook
Anomaly report: The David that didn’t cough in the night-time
Anomaly report: The David that didn’t cough in the night-time
I’ve been travelling for the last 12 days and during this time something really weird happened: I didn’t get ill during the entire trip.
This never happens. I get ill constantly at the best of times, and I was in a new environment, surrounded by people,Admittedly mostly in well ventilated spaces, and I masked when in airports though not on airplanes. and extremely worn down.I also got exposed to COVID on day 1, though I’ve had it recently enough that I’m probably pretty immune, and we were outside so it was probably safe.
I definitely felt like I started getting ill a few times. I got the telltale sore throat that is a common beginning of illness for me, and there was one evening that I felt a little bit under the weather… and each time this then just immediately went away.
This is extremely surprising, but I have a theory. It’s not a good enough theory that I have any confidence in it yet, but it’s got a plausible mechanism of action for causing this, and seems enough worth trying that I’m going to keep going for a bit and see what happens.
The mechanism is this: While travelling, I was using Smartmouth zinc-activated mouthwash. I ran into it because I was looking for zinc lozengesWhich I do low key believe fend off colds, but admittedly based on very weak evidence relative to their level of inconvenience and could only find homeopathic ones, but I also needed mouth wash, saw this, and reckoned it was worth a go.
The basic idea as to why this, or zinc lozenges, might work is that zinc is antiviral (as well as being antibacterial, which is its major intended purpose in Smartmouth), so coating your mouth with zinc kills off any virus living in your throat. This lines up with my experience of starting to get sore throats and have them mysteriously go away.
Is this a real effect? Unsure. Probably not. I think it’s worth exploring further from a luck-based medicine point of view though.
Other plausible theories include:
- I really wasn’t exposed to that much virus with the quality of the air filtration where I was.
- I was running on adrenaline, and now I’m about to get sick now that this has calmed down a bit.This isn’t consistent with when I normally get ill while travelling though.
Mostly I’m just preregistering the theory.And wanted an easy post I could phone in having just arrived home from a very long flight. I’ll continue trying it for a while and see what happens.