Medicine’s Great Unfinished Business: The Common Cold

I have been at death’s door for the past 24 hours. You don’t know it (and perhaps you don’t even care) but I have come down with a nasty cold. I was shaking as though the very foundations of Western civilization were about to collapse, running a high fever, and aching all over as if I were undergoing a tax inspection through the rectum. There are certain things about scientific progress that I simply cannot understand: why on earth have we reached the Moon, taught machines to talk, and managed to 3D-print Dr. Fauci’s testicles, yet still haven’t figured out how to stop a simple cold?

Once again, turning to medicine has done me no good. Every day I become more of a fan of self-medication.

Last night, when my shivering felt like the final throes of death, I called a doctor friend and asked him for something that might cure a cold quickly. He told me: “Don’t smoke. Drink plenty of water. Get some rest.” I immediately reached for an old medical book I keep at home, a family-medicine manual written by a doctor in the 19th century. And what did it prescribe for a cold? Exactly the same thing: sleep, water, and rest. We haven’t made any progress at all!

What’s more, this prescription is discriminatory and exclusionary: there is absolutely no way a journalist could follow it. We need to smoke in order to do our jobs; we use plain water only in the shower; and, personally, I cannot remember the last time I slept, although it was probably the night before my First Communion.

I called another doctor, a friend who is rather more didactic, and he explained that the reason there is no cure for the common cold is that it is not caused by a single virus. There are thousands of viruses capable of producing the same result, which we call a cold — a word which, according to him, comes from the Latin for “when your balls feel heavy and you have a lot of snot.”

So the only remedy capable of dealing with any of the viruses that cause a cold is the noose and, for reasons that escape me, that does not quite satisfy the minimum ethical requirements laid down by the medical associations.

They say there are good patients and bad patients. I am the worst in the world. Whenever I fall ill, I am convinced that I am going to die. It is not a joke or some vague feeling: I genuinely believe it. The severity of the illness makes no difference. A mere two-tenths of a degree of fever is enough to send me into Latin hymns of repentance and pleas for mercy.

People always say that men are stronger than women — assuming the UK’s sexism police will allow me to say so — and perhaps that is true until a cold strikes. Women are perfectly capable of carrying on with their normal lives even in the midst of the most terrifying cold, complete with fever, coughing, and violent shivering.

Every winter, I usually take a sort of pseudo-medicine sold in Spain which claims to strengthen the immune system. The truth is that, after looking into it, I discovered that even the pharmaceutical company itself does not know exactly how its product works, although it does appear to produce positive results in some people. Given the price, you would expect rather more scientific certainty.

Fed up with this annual winter ritual, and with the fortune those bloody capsules cost, I decided not to take them this year. And yet, even before the cold weather had properly arrived, I had already been at death’s door. It still amazes me that, at this stage of scientific evolution, we are stumbling around in the dark. Taking this stuff makes me feel as though I am performing a rain dance, like the Native Americans did centuries ago.

My fever has come down a little and I have stopped feeling freezing cold all the time. I may survive. Even so, I cannot get the thought out of my head that the cold will return at any moment — almost certainly at the most inconvenient possible moment.

And now, whenever I see the vast sums being invested in the development of AI, personal beauty products or completely absurd technologies, it annoys me even more. After all these centuries of medical progress, nobody has managed to understand one very simple truth: for the person suffering from a cold, that bloody, snot-filled illness is the biggest problem in the world.

In the meantime, in an effort to recover more quickly, I bought a dietary supplement containing half a dozen vitamins and enough zinc to sink a battleship. I confess that my symptoms haven’t improved, but on the other hand, I feel like a bloody roof.

Once again, turning to medicine has done me no good. Every day I become more of a fan of self-medication. And how wise those words of Wodehouse were: “An apple a day, if well aimed, keeps the doctor away.”

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