a few years back zinc acetate lozenges were doing the rounds and I love a good superstition so I went ahead and incorporated that into my belief system. been a while so I thought I’d check to see if the state of the science on the subject had shifted since then
afaict there hasn’t been much work on the subject in the intervening time, and nothing much to change your mind one way or the other. good work everyone, you may return to your superstition behavior.
some details:
one study¹ recently reported a null result, but based on the going theory for zinc lozenges that’s what you would expect (zinc acetate was administered by capsules). also the study was lacking in other ways.
another² has a good looking graph and is maybe positive for the concept. haven’t read the fully study yet
that’s maybe about it? my method for researching this research was to search pubmed for “(zinc) AND ((acetate) OR (gluconate)) lozenge” plus some other words instead of lozenge, as there were too many results without an additional keyword for filtering. I am sure there are other places results are published besides pubmed. feel free to catapult relevant studies into my inbox
yeah that sounds fucked up! had no idea that was the case for some people, I always thought of a cold as a 1-3 day kind of thing. but presumably if someone gets 20 day colds they’re probably very glad to cut a week off that
The third week of a cold sucks a lot less than the first week so, like, maybe only as much as a normal person’s cold, but yeah if there’s a pill for cutting that third week off, I’m interested regardless of whether it helps with the main brunt of the cold. Gonna have to look into this.
you want zinc acetate, or if that’s not available, zinc gluconate. it has to be a lozenge or otherwise dissolve in your mouth, since the theoretical method of action is coating some tissue or receptor or something with ionic zinc. preferably with as few additives as possible. if it doesn’t taste bad and feel astringent, it’s not working. in the US everyone buys the life extension ones. idk about elsewhere
it is ideal to start as soon as possible. preferably in the not-sure-if-im-actually-sick-yet phase. starting once the infection is well developed seems to be much less effective
tbh I will actually take one prophylactically if I feel like I was in a high exposure environment. this is a not the protocol the research was done on but it seems reasonable and as long I don’t do this every day it is at worst a bad tasting zinc supplement
iirc the studies mostly had a protocol along the lines of one lozenge (of varying size and type?) every 1.5-2 hours while awake until symptoms subside. that’s a lot. it seems to produce some effect in the studies. I do not know that anyone has done any real study on taking more or less to compare, so it’s unclear what the optimal amount is, or how long it is worthwhile to persist in taking them
…well, I tried a Life Extension zinc-acetate lozenge (not to be confused with a Life Extension zinc-oxide/gluconate + citric acid lozenge, which I previously got by accident and which are much wimpier), and, uh, that was kind of scary.
I *didn’t even get a full dose*! I ended up running out of time before bed and having to spit two-thirds of it out! And it *still* took about *17 hours* for my sense of taste to stop being blunted!
(my sense of smell still worked, FTR, so I’m *probably* not just leaving a proverbial bad Yankee Candle review)
…I’ll *consider* giving it one more try the next time I’m *confident* I’m sick, but I cannot do this at-first-sign-of-illness when my first-sign-of-illness has a 99%+ false-positive rate.
yeah that sounds like a bad reaction, don’t think I’d bother with that either
from a single lozenge I do notice astringency but the effects on taste are minor. I hardly notice them, I don’t mind them much when I do, and they last at most a few hours if that
For me, TheraZinc lozenges pretty consistently stop colds if I start using them as soon as I notice a sore throat (haven’t tried Life Extension, have tried Cold-Eeze and they were bullshit.) they do indeed fuck up my sense of taste for days, and that’s a decent tradeoff for me because my colds have a tendency to turn into bronchitis. but it’s hard for me to voluntarily inflict that much unpleasantness on myself >_< so sometimes I don’t.
Yeah, the “as soon as I notice a sore throat” aspect is probably the main hurdle here. This could maybe have been a very valuable antidepressant for, like, 2015!me, but these days…well, these were some of my tags on that recent reblog:
(the current ratio is *mostly* because I have other forms of throat irritation way more often now, but partly because I have fewer colds thanks to more other layers in my security I’m literally writing this while wearing a P100 because my sick housemate was recently puttering about in our kitchen completely bare-faced like an asshole)
I have a really hard time doing QALY analyses on myself because my brain’s response to being queried on how much lifespan it would give up in exchange for not experiencing X suffering is “we do not negotiate with terrorists”, but ‘hypogeusia is more than 1% as bad as severe depression’ seems like a very plausible statement to me.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #the power of science #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #illness tw #death tw? #venting cw? #he *has* at least been refraining from hanging out in the living room or in our parents’ room #and *sometimes* he wears a KF94 (unsealed‚ but he might not *know* how to seal a mask around facial hair) when he’s fetching food/water #I don’t know why he’s landed on ”sometimes” and I don’t dare ask
Brinens and Things 
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