David R. MacIver's Blog

Anomaly report: The David that didn't cough in the night-time

This post was originally published at notebook.drmaciver.com.

I’ve been travelling for the last 12 days and during this time something really weird happened: I didn’t get ill during the entire trip.

This never happens. I get ill constantly at the best of times, and I was in a new environment, surrounded by people, and extremely worn down.

I definitely felt like I started getting ill a few times. I got the telltale sore throat that is a common beginning of illness for me, and there was one evening that I felt a little bit under the weather… and each time this then just immediately went away.

This is extremely surprising, but I have a theory. It’s not a good enough theory that I have any confidence in it yet, but it’s got a plausible mechanism of action for causing this, and seems enough worth trying that I’m going to keep going for a bit and see what happens.

The mechanism is this: While travelling, I was using Smartmouth zinc-activated mouthwash. I ran into it because I was looking for zinc lozenges and could only find homeopathic ones, but I also needed mouth wash, saw this, and reckoned it was worth a go.

The basic idea as to why this, or zinc lozenges, might work is that zinc is antiviral (as well as being antibacterial, which is its major intended purpose in Smartmouth), so coating your mouth with zinc kills off any virus living in your throat. This lines up with my experience of starting to get sore throats and have them mysteriously go away.

Is this a real effect? Unsure. Probably not. I think it’s worth exploring further from a luck-based medicine point of view though.

Other plausible theories include:

Mostly I’m just preregistering the theory. I’ll continue trying it for a while and see what happens.