When I start having a feeling of getting a cold I drink Bayer's Aspirin Plus C. It's literally just aspirin and vitamin C but I swear it works. Not drinking aspirin and vitamin C but only this overpriced combination. When it is dissolved in water, grossly enough. Nothing else works. If I don't drink it, I get a cold.

I literally worked in pharmaceutical science and I know this is complete bullshit borderlining homeopathy but I still swear by it. I wrote a whole academic work on vitamin C supplementation having no effect on getting a cold. And I still do it 😭

[–] shneancy@lemmy.world 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

placebo is one hell of a uh not drug!

i noticed that sometimes when i have something important coming up, and i start feeling ill, i can just, force myself to stop? Literally tell myself "nuhuh, we're not getting ill right now, that's not the time" and it works? well not always, but more than it should

[–] volvoxvsmarla@lemm.ee 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

That might actually be cortisol released by a stress response. Do you tend to get sick a couple of days later when "there's time"?

[–] shneancy@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

sometimes! other times it goes away entirely. I vividly remember the first time it happened, it was the first day of vacation at my great grandmother's place. i started feeling ill but got so mad at that fact i woke up the next day feeling healthy again, and got to enjoy my vacation fully :)

[–] volvoxvsmarla@lemm.ee 4 points 3 days ago

Nice! That's a great sign of how our mind can control our body. Something that we biomedics sometimes struggle with, in our eternal search for pathways.

I often had this when I had to study for exams. I was so stressed that I didn't allow myself to get sick, and once the last exam was done, the stress level fell and I got so sick.

[–] USNWoodwork@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I learned about Linus Pauling's ideas on Vitamin C supplementation. Pretty interesting stuff, especially wrt heart disease. I'm paraphrasing but if I remember correctly he theorized that our appendix used to produce vitamin C and that it somehow mutated away from that, and the lack of the vital nutrient causes heart disease problems with humans and all the great apes. Apparently we all get heart disease like cats have bad kidneys. He thought huge doses of vitamin C were the answer.

[–] volvoxvsmarla@lemm.ee 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Yes, he is usually (and anecdotally) used in every introduction to works that cover vitamins and supplementation 😅 but unfortunately his ideas weren't really backed by science. If you eat more vitamin c than you can absorb, you just pee it out. We actually did that in university (control group, breakfast group, breakfast + 1g of vitamin c group, testing the pee and I think capillary blood). Now, I think there are some findings with intravenous vitamin c acting like an oxidizing agent and killing cancer (?) cells, but macrodosing orally just doesn't give you any effect.

Also, fun fact, your RDA can be met by eating one frozen pizza because vitamin c is used as a food additive everywhere.

[–] shneancy@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago

macrodosing vitamin c gives my awful stomach cramps :(