The cold is an “incurable disease” and cannot be treated with drugs, but can only relieve the symptoms. Saying that the cold is “incurable” does not mean that you will die if you have a cold, but “incurable” has two meanings: one is that the cold does not require specialized treatment, and the other is that there is no medicine that can cure the cold. 90% of colds are caused by viruses, and only 10% are caused by bacterial infections, and the difference between bacteria and viruses is that bacteria have cells, while viruses have no cells, only RNA. Antimicrobials can effectively identify and kill bacteria with cells, but they cannot find viruses without cells, and they cannot kill viruses. Therefore, antimicrobial agents cannot shorten the course of a cold caused by a virus. However, when the human body is invaded by the cold virus, the immune system immediately produces the corresponding antibodies, and when the antibodies accumulate to a certain amount, the virus is killed and the cold is cured by itself. Instead of curing the cold, antimicrobials may bring other harm, deafness is not cured but become blind again. Tetracycline has ruined the teeth of a generation, while streptomycin, gentamicin and kanamycin have caused deafness in some people, and the abuse of antimicrobials may also damage liver and kidney function and lead to disorders of the intestinal flora. Therefore, the act of going to the hospital with a cold, the doctor prescribing a large number of drugs, and the scene of rows of people sitting in the hospital for infusion, these should not appear. However, there are so many drugs on the market that claim to cure colds, and they usually disappear after a few days of eating them, what is going on? In fact, the effect of these medicines is not to kill the virus and terminate the course of the disease, but only to reduce the symptoms. For example, if a patient has a severe fever or headache, you can use some antipyretic tablets, which can help reduce the patient’s mental pain and physical exertion. However, this only applies to patients with severe symptoms, if the symptoms are not severe and there is no urgent work waiting to be done, and what is the need for medication? It is important to know that the body raises the body temperature in order to recruit and mobilize more immune troops to fight the virus. Can’t medication cure a cold, so there’s nothing you can do about it but wait for it to cure itself? No, there are also some means to help it heal itself. When we feel cold, we tend to shrink up and even get goose bumps, because our body has an insulation mechanism. The body does not know whether the temperature will rise or fall in the future, and in order to prevent frostbite, as soon as it gets cold, it gives instructions to its largest protective organ, the skin, to make the pores contract in order to reduce heat loss while avoiding cold air from coming in. However, many times we store too much heat in our body, which needs to be dissipated. Now that the pores are contracted, the heat can’t come out, and symptoms of cold such as fever will appear. Obviously, the treatment of cold has to dissipate heat, need to open all the channels of heat dissipation, and the skin is a very important organ of heat dissipation and detoxification, so both domestic and foreign countries have hit on the idea of the skin. The foreign practice is to rub the skin with alcohol to take away the heat through the evaporation of alcohol. We Chinese like to cover the quilt, which will make the body realize that the outside is not so cold, open the pores will not come in a lot of cold air to cause harm to themselves, slowly pores will open up, holding in the body heat will be emitted. In addition, some people use cool towels to cover their foreheads to cool down, some people use ice to cool down, and others use ginger and white onion to boil water to dissipate heat, all for the same reason. However, cooling the fever with ice is fast, but it tends to rebound because the body’s insulation mechanisms kick in next, such as dense pore insulation, so the patient may experience low-grade fever symptoms for quite some time and is recommended for high fever relief. I advocate sweating to relieve the heat and open all the detoxification channels, which is more complete and less prone to rebound. The second way to treat a cold is to get more rest and drink more water. Drinking more water is easy to understand, because both heat dissipation and detoxification need water as a carrier, and drinking more water is good for these tasks. So, what about more rest? The blood has to transport immune troops to where the virus is, which requires energy, and rest conserves energy and speeds up the transport of white blood cells. Moreover, when you sleep, the lymphatic system is more powerful and more effective in fighting viruses, which helps to solve problems such as inflammation caused by colds. Therefore, patients with colds, rest more and drink more water.