Skip to main content

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.
Lori Miller said…
Thanks for the kind words. Hope you have good results with the probiotics, too.
Stay well Lori.

All the best Jan
Lori Miller said…
You too, Jan!

Popular posts from this blog

Not Only Cheaper, But Easier

A while back, I wrote about saving money on break time coffee and snacks. I haven't done very well putting it into practice. But a post by James Clear today got me thinking about it again: Warren Buffett uses a two-list system to prioritize things. Check it out --and follow the instructions. Using Buffett's two-list system, two of the goals I ended up with were taking care of myself and saving $400 more per month than I already am. As I said, I've been wanting to save money, and the system made me really focus on this. I came up with 11 money-saving ideas, six of which had to do with food. Buying hamburger in bulk. Ranch Foods Direct sells one-pound packages of 80% lean pastured ground beef in bundles of 20 for a lot less than Whole Foods. Sprouts only carries super-lean beef that's grass-fed, and it's more expensive, too.  Not driving to Whole Foods. Whole Foods is out of my way, and saving a weekly trip saves gas. Coffee at home, tea at work. Tea is fr...

Palpitations Gone with Iron

Thanks to my internet friend Larcana, who alerted me to the connection between iron deficiency and palpitations, I doubled down on my iron supplements and, for good measure, washed them down with Emergen-C. It's a cold medicine with a mega-dose of vitamin C, plus B vitamins and minerals. I don't think vitamin C does anything for a cold (a friend bought the stuff and left it at my house the last time she visited), but vitamin C does help iron absorption. After doubling up on iron in the last three days, I feel back to normal. (I'd already been taking quite a bit of magnesium and potassium, so I probably had sufficient levels of those.) How did I get so low on iron? Maybe it was too many Quest bars instead of red meat when I had odd cravings during my dental infection recently. Maybe because it's too hard to find liver at the grocery store and I haven't eaten much of it lately. Maybe the antibiotics damaged my intestines . And apparently, I'm a heavy bleeder . ...

Collagen-filled Low Carb Burritos

Low-carb, grain-free Mexican food is hard to find, but it's easy to make your own at home. This recipe has an authentic ingredient: carne de lengua, or beef tongue. Don't be put off: beef tongue is tender, delicious, and full of collagen. Look for it directly from farmers in your area. To cook it, cut it in 1" to 1-1/2" slices and pressure cook for one hour. Enjoy the delicious broth as a bonus. Ingredients 1 slice cooked beef tongue, peeled and cut into small cubes 1 egg wrap (I use these  from Egglife) 1/4 cup cooked black or pinto beans Chili pepper Oregano Garlic (powdered or minced) Cumin Guacamole (with no emulsifiers) Salsa Shredded cheddar cheese Sour cream or homemade cream cheese  with no emulsifiers  Put the egg wrap on a plate and put the beef and beans down the middle of it. Sprinkle with the herbs and spices. Wrap, turn over and microwave for 1-2 minutes. Spoon salsa over the burrito and sprinkle with cheese. Add guacamole and sour cream or homemade crea...

Blog Lineup Change

Bye-bye, Fathead. I've enjoyed the blog, but can't endorse the high-fat, high-carb Perfect Health Diet that somehow makes so much sense to some otherwise bright people. An astrophysicist makes some rookie mistakes on a LC diet, misdiagnoses them, makes up "glucose deficiency," and creates a diet that's been shown in intervention studies to increase small LDL, which can lead to heart disease. A computer programmer believes in the diet and doesn't seem eager to refute it because, perhaps, scientists are freakin' liars and while he's good at spotting logical inconsistencies, lacks some intermediate knowledge of human biology. To Tom's credit, he says it's not the right diet for everyone, but given the truckload of food that has to be prepared and eaten, impracticality of following it while traveling (or even not traveling), and unsuitability for FODMAPs sufferers, diabetics and anyone prone to heart disease (i.e., much of the population), I'm...

Getting Over Palpitations

Note to new readers: please note I'm not a health care provider and have no medical training. If you have heart palpitations, I have no idea whether the following will work for you. Over the past several days, I've had a rough time with heart palpitations and feeling physically jittery. I was wondering if I was going to turn into one of those people who can't sit still. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it would be a major lifestyle change. Kidding aside, something wasn't right and I really needed to get back to normal. I tried popping potassium pills like candy. I ate more. I doubled up on my iron dose. I went to yoga and even got on the treadmill at 6 AM yesterday. I tried the nuclear option of eating more carbs to stop peeing away minerals. Most of these things helped, but the problem kept coming back. A comment from Galina made me look up epinephrine, one of the drugs my surgeon used to anesthetize me Friday. First, the assistant at the surge...