My New Favorite Cold Medicine

Regular readers might remember my bouts with respiratory illnesses: bronchitis that hung on for months, colds that wouldn't go away, sinus infections so frequent that I had sinoplasty many years ago (it didn't stop my sinus infections), and even a week in the hospital with a sinus infection when I was a kid. The sickest I ever felt was when I had the flu at age 17. As someone (maybe Dr. Eades) recently described, I remember where I was and what I was doing when it came on.

Last week when I felt a cold coming on, I figured I'd be sick for several days. I was tired and starting to get congestion and a sore throat. But it went away 12 hours later and didn't come back.

Photo from Unsplash.

Maybe it was short COVID.

Kidding aside, the only difference is that I've been taking Ideal Immunity, a probiotic made by Biotiquest. (I'm not an affiliate.) Some of the members at Dr. Davis's Inner Circle have been getting incredible results with Sugar Shift lowering their blood sugar; another member has greatly improved her atrial fibrillation with Simple Slumber.

Ideal Immunity was the only thing I took (besides a cough drop). I didn't make a yogurt out of it--I normally take one pill, but took two the night I felt sick.

* * * * *

My old favorite cold medicine was ivermectin. Ivermectin is antibacterial, and since I go to great lengths to avoid killing my gut bacteria, I'm not going to take it for cold symptoms anymore. First of all, the probiotics worked a lot better. Second, the omicron variant of COVID is, so I have heard, no worse than a cold, and so it doesn't justify taking something that might kill gut bacteria.

I'm going to continue taking the probiotics through the winter. Based on one of the ways they work (strengthening your gut lining), I don't think you'd get such fast results by taking them after you get sick. They're kind of pricey, but if you want to stretch them out, the vendor has a recipe to make yogurt. The recipe calls for Sugar Shift, but it has most of the same bacteria as Ideal Immunity.

Here's a link to my video on making perfect yogurt.

Stay well!

Comments

Anonymous said…

Hi Lori! I know you from Dr. Davis' Inner Circle. I'm happy to see your response to Ideal Immunity. I began (maybe a couple of weeks ago) taking Sugar Shift and Ideal Immunity, one in the morning and the other in the evening. It's a little early to rave about the benefits, but I'm cautiously optimistic, as they say.

I always enjoy your posts & input on the weekly meetups.

Stay well.

October 25, 2022

Lori Miller said…

Thanks for the kind words. Hope you have good results with the probiotics, too.

October 25, 2022

Lowcarb team member said…

Stay well Lori.

All the best Jan

October 25, 2022

Lori Miller said…

You too, Jan!

October 25, 2022

Fasting blood sugar & insulin have crept up!

It's pretty bad when even conventional medicine thinks your blood sugar is high. I had lab tests done last week, as I do every year, and saw things were going in the wrong direction. Photo from Pixabay . Uh-oh. Ideal blood sugar is about 70-90. Your blood sugar can be high because you're stressed or ill, but I felt OK. I can't blame it on cortisol, which was smack in the middle of the normal range. And my A1c, which reflects blood sugar over the past few months, shows that whatever is going on has been happening for a while. My insulin is more than double what it should be. Oddly, my triglycerides, which typically indicate carb consumption, were good. I don't have an explanation for the triglycerides. I should have suspected something was wrong, though. I've felt very tired and a little sad for the past few months. Unlike many people with higher than ideal blood sugar and insulin, I had only gained about three pounds. Regardless of my good weight and triglyceride...

Infrared Light: How much is too much?

It's the sort of thing that sounds like quackery: a pad with tiny red LED lights and a few buttons that's supposed to help you heal, just $30 on ebay. I never would have bought it, but Dr. Davis gave a presentation on infrared light late in 2024. Since I was still suffering from achilles tendonitis after being floxxed , I decided to try it. I wrapped it around my ankle and turned it on the lowest setting for five minutes. Nothing seemed to happen, but the next day, I wrote, My tendonitis is GONE after one 5-minute treatment! I didn’t feel it doing anything, I didn’t think it was going to do anything (at least not that quickly), but for the first time in several months, I’ve gotten out of bed and started walking normally and didn’t have any pain reaching with my left arm. I'd been shuffling around like an 80-year-old woman after getting out of bed in the morning. The tendonitis returned, but it was improved. I eventually had physical therapy for it, and now, apart from a l...

Lousy Mood? It Could be the Food

Here's a funny AMV(1) on what it's like to be depressed, apathetic and overly sensitive. Note: explicit (but funny) lyrics in the video. Hearing this song brought a startling realization: I used to be emo, but with normal clothes. Sulking, sobbing and writing poetry were my hobbies. When I was a kid, my mother said that she wouldn't know what to do to punish me if I had done something wrong. And yet things got worse. Over a two-week period in 1996, my best friend moved away, I lost my job and broke up with my boyfriend. I lost my appetite and lived on a daily bagel, cream cheese and a Coke for the next few months. I had tried counseling, and didn't find it helpful; in fact, I found reviving painful memories was pointless. Not thinking about them, on the other hand, worked wonders. Later on, so did studying philosophy and learning to think through emotions instead of just riding through them. But what's blown away all the techniques is diet. Since I s...

Gym Influencer Doubles Down and Should Have Regretted It

Jennifer Picone isn't the most abusive gym influencer--far from it--but she may be the most annoying. In a video she posted that went viral, she was working out in a gym when another member appeared in the background by the free weights. The member was minding her own business, not looking in Picone's direction, when Picone got up and told her to move. After filming, Picone edited the video with a note about "Gym etiquette lesson #47" and accused the other gym member of "[doing] that 💩 on purpose." Shaming other gym members has gotten to be such a big genre that Joey Swoll has a YouTube channel, with half a million subscribers, dedicated to calling out these content creators. Just for Picone, he took a break from his vacation to tell her to mind her own business. This may be the first time that Joey Swoll has taken one of his followers to task. The fact that she follows him and still doesn't know better than to treat the gym like her personal studio sh...

Stay in your car!

If there's ever a lunatic outside your vehicle, do not engage. Stay in your vehicle. Drive away or call the police. Drive over the curb, lawn or median if necessary; just avoid putting innocent bystanders at risk.* Save yourself from lunatics like a boss. Screen grab from video by Fredrik Sørlie on Youtube . That advice might have saved a 69-year-old delivery driver from being attacked by former NFL player Mark Sanchez, who for unknown reasons was in an alley after midnight in downtown Indianapolis and decided to pick a fight over a parking space. I say might have because I haven't seen any video of the attack. But other incidents over the years bear out the safety of staying in your car. A neighbor was assaulted and robbed after she got out of her car after someone followed her home and blocked her driveway. And remember Reginald Denny from the LA riots? The victim maced and stabbed Sanchez, but suffered a bad cut to his face and tongue and looks like he was badly beaten. Bo...

Pain, Pain, Go Away!

Search This Blog