Cold – How to Cure it in One Day?

This time, I want to share a transcript of an incredibly useful video by the wonderful Russian doctor, Timofey Karmatsky (below).

From my own experience, I want to add that preventing a cold is much easier and more pleasant than curing it. In situations that previously led to colds, you should tell yourself: "this is safe," "I feel cold now, but it is not life-threatening, I'll feel cold for a bit and then I'll get warm again either at home or somewhere along the way, like in a store."

So, here is the actual transcript below:

As we know, if you treat a cold, it takes a week to get better, and if you don’t treat it, it takes seven days. This, of course, is not true. If you treat a cold properly, it goes away much faster. Moreover, if everything is done right, it doesn’t develop at all, like in my case right now. I used to constantly suffer from colds, and the scenario was always the same: a draft, getting chilled, drinking something cold, etc. It would start with a sore throat, then this soreness would spread up and down the throat, eventually turning into bronchitis, with nasal congestion leading to sinusitis, lasting two weeks, three weeks, sometimes even a month, followed by a dry cough, then a wet cough, and so on, always following the same downward spiral. Now, this doesn’t happen at all because I changed something. What needs to change to stop suffering from colds or learn to cure them very quickly? Let’s divide all colds into three main categories that we encounter in real life.

The first category is colds after getting chilled: you opened a window, went outside underdressed, sat in a draft, or submerged in cold water, or something similar. Here, we also include drinking cold liquids like cold water or cold milk, etc.

The second type of cold is after stress. If you analyze different people with different types of, let’s say, colds, you will see that a certain percentage of all these cold-related illnesses—sore throat, tracheitis, laryngitis, sinusitis, rhinitis, bronchitis, etc.—develop after some stressful event, when there was no chilling because, for example, it was summer or in Thailand or another country where there is nothing cold, not even air conditioning, yet people still get colds.

The third type is so-called colds that occur out of nowhere: there was no stress and no chilling, or at least neither could be identified, and when you ask someone what happened before this, they say nothing happened. They didn’t drink anything cold, didn’t get chilled, didn’t notice anything unusual; just suddenly, it’s a warm enough autumn, and suddenly, a person gets a cold, or a child starts school, and nothing at all happened, and suddenly, they catch a cold. It seems there should be three different scenarios for each of these cases of getting a cold, but no, in reality, the essence of all three types of colds is absolutely the same: it’s a psychological reaction to what’s happening. The first type of cold, from getting chilled, is a psychological reaction to the chilling because not every time you react to a glass of cold water with a cold, and sometimes you don’t react to a glass of cold water but react to a glass of cold milk, you don’t react to a glass of cold water and milk, there’s a cold, and to a glass of cold beer or a shot of ice-cold vodka, there’s no cold. So sometimes the chilling triggers it, and sometimes it doesn’t.

It depends on your psychological reaction to the chilling process itself in each specific situation. With stress, it’s all clear—it’s a psychological reaction to stress, but not just any stress leads to a cold, only specific stress when the psyche reacts in a specific way, similar to the principle with chilling.

Finally, the so-called colds that occur out of the blue, not actually out of the blue, but after interacting with what we call triggers. For example, if school starts on September 1st, this is a trigger because maybe there was some stress related to school on some other day. Right now, he’s going to school, and there’s no stress, the weather is warm, no chilling, no stress. It seems like nothing should happen, but suddenly, it does, because for the subconscious, there is no past, present, or future; it’s all one. If he once went to school on September 1st and was somehow mistreated, then the next year when he goes to school on September 1st, the mere fact of going there is already perceived as a threat by the subconscious, and this is already a stress for him.

But the person doesn’t notice it, and seemingly out of nowhere, he gets a cold when, in reality, it’s not out of nowhere. In reality, there was contact with some trigger—a reminder of past problems—and it is this contact and the subconscious reaction to it that causes the subsequent cold. All three variants—chilling, stress, or contact with a trigger—boil down to the same thing: it’s a psychological reaction to some perceived threat or scare.

And as we understand, this threat can be anything: a threat in the form of a draft, the threat of chilling, the threat of a cold floor, the threat of cold water. Since childhood, we’ve been drummed into our heads that cold is bad, cold is dangerous. “Don’t drink cold, you’ll get sick. Don’t eat cold ice cream; your throat will hurt. Don’t go out without a hat; you’ll get blown through and get meningitis and die. Don’t walk around undressed; you’ll get pneumonia and die,” and so on. People are wound up about cold from childhood; cold turns into a threat, cold generates fear on a conscious or subconscious level.

On the other hand, if a person grows up in an environment where the attitude towards cold is absolutely calm, like some Gypsies who, from childhood, sit with their mother on cold, icy concrete, completely undressed, running around barefoot, frolicking without any reaction to the chilling process, they also don’t get colds. Well, this is just an example. By the same principle, actually, hardening works—the physiological reaction of the body to the chilling process is always the same: vasoconstriction, centralization of blood circulation, and so on, but the psychological reaction in a hardened person is completely different because they gradually got used to it, so there is no psychological reaction, no physical colds.

Patrick is currently lying on my lap, peacefully sleeping. However, if another dog appears beyond the fence and starts barking, or if someone walks by him or any noise occurs—any event that Patrick perceives as a threat to his territory—this location where we are filming, which he considers his territory, will provoke a response from him. He will perceive it as a territorial threat and will respond accordingly. And what will he do after a second or two of thought? Right, he will start barking.

In nature, there’s an established mechanism: if there’s a threat to your territory or the territory of any animal (back when the Earth was populated only by animals), the animal will react. How does it react? It will somehow signal to the threat that is violating the boundaries of our territory or potentially could violate them that it should not come here, this place is occupied, this territory is guarded. “This is my territory, go find another one.” And how do animals let each other know about it? Correct, they either bark, growl, howl, or make other sounds to say, “don’t come here.” A mechanism has formed to growl, bark, or make other sounds louder and more effectively to repel this unwelcome guest, to deter the threat. To do this, a larger volume of air must pass through the lungs, trachea, bronchi, and vocal cords in a unit of time, making the growl louder.

Therefore, at the moment a territorial threat arises, the cells of the mucous membranes of the throat, trachea, bronchi, vocal cords, etc., begin to break down minimally so that, from nature’s and an evolutionary standpoint, you could shout louder, howl louder, repel or curse louder, and so on. But after the threat has passed—for instance, you drank a glass of cold milk and the threat passed, or a draft blew on you and you sat in it for an hour or two, went home and the threat was gone, or you experienced stress because a policeman checked your documents or a traffic officer stopped you, or you were attacked or harassed by a drunk man but then returned home and the threat was gone—after the threat has passed, the breakdown of our throat’s mucous membrane that occurred during the stress is no longer relevant. It’s no longer needed, and the reverse process starts—the repair process, and that’s when the cold that we all are familiar with begins.

We often say, “I got caught in a draft, and then I got sick,” or “I drank a glass of milk, and then I got sick,” or “I went to school and got sick after that.” Essentially, the common theme is that after these events, a cold develops. A cold primarily affects the throat, and what’s needed during the repair process? Swelling, inflammation, a watery environment is required, leading to coughing up mucus, the emergence of nasal discharge, mucus, pus, and so forth. Essentially, the core of throat inflammation, nasal inflammation, bronchial inflammation, vocal cords, larynx, etc., is simply the repair of the mucous membrane that reacted to a threat.

So, to stop a cold or to prevent getting colds in general, what should you do if you suddenly find yourself with a cold and want to recover quickly? The first thing to do is to recognize the threat you reacted to. With a glass of milk, cold water, ice cream, and exposure to drafts, standing on a cold floor—it’s all clear. But if a cold seems to have started out of nowhere, you need to think. If you woke up with a cold, then the threat was during the night or the day before, in the evening; if your cold worsens towards the evening, then the threat occurred during the day or in the morning; if you have a cold during the day, then the threat likely happened in the morning. So, rewind about 24 hours or 12 hours back in time and examine what the threat was, what scared you, or was there a reminder of some past threats. The task is to find this threat, realize that it occurred, and ensure that it cannot be repeated at this time, or if it might repeat, you need to ensure it physically cannot happen, whatever it may be, to protect yourself from this threat in the future.

The second thing to do is to accelerate the repair of the mucous membrane so your cold doesn’t last an entire month as it usually does, but maybe just one or two days, or even just a few hours. What should you do to speed up the repair? The primary accelerators of repair are as follows. The first is heating; everyone knows, especially in the countryside, if you catch a cold, head to the sauna. In the sauna, you sweat, heat up, and maybe even feel a bit ill, but then you drink some tea, go to sleep, and wake up in the morning feeling fresh as a cucumber. Why? Because heating accelerates any inflammation. Inflammation is a form of repair, so heating accelerates the repair. Not everyone has a sauna or a steam room, and moreover, both a sauna and a steam room should be comfortable, physiologically speaking. If you heat up to 120 degrees, it becomes a new threat and only makes things worse. Therefore, to avoid fussing with saunas and steam rooms, each of you has a bathtub. Use a packet of bath salt, make the water a comfortable temperature, lie in it, and stay there as long as possible, quietly heating up in the salty water. This accelerates all types of repair in the body. If you don’t have a bathtub, make a one percent saline solution and soak your feet in a basin with comfortably warm water. With the leftover water, make a one percent solution and use a little bit to gargle. This will also accelerate the repair process.

The next powerful accelerator for any phase of recovery or repair is vacuum cups. You take the vacuum cups and place them over the area that is being repaired. In this case, we are repairing this zone. We cannot just slap them anywhere—if you do, you’ll get bruises, which is pointless and not crucial. Place them on the chest, both at the front and the back. This old, time-tested Soviet method has cured tens of hundreds of thousands of people. My mom, your grandmothers, everyone used to put them on. Nowadays, this method has somewhat fallen into oblivion; don’t forget it, use the cups every day for 10 minutes, on the back and front of the chest. Recovery will be much faster.

Another powerful accelerator for any repair, especially of mucous membranes, is vitamins. Load up on vitamins A, C, and E in increased, double, triple doses. This is absolutely safe and has been tested by practice and time. Use any sources of these vitamins. Finally, since mucous membranes, muscles, cartilage, joints—in fact, as biological entities, we are entirely composed of proteins and fats—for any part of the body to repair itself as quickly as possible, we need building materials, primarily proteins. The body breaks down proteins into amino acids, and these amino acids are used like bricks, particularly for the repair of mucous membranes, where lysine and proline are needed. But instead of specifically buying and spending money on lysine and proline for repair, I simply recommend saturating your body with available sources of protein. The optimal choice would be something like chicken soup, beef broth, or a broth made from bones. This is a type of easily digestible broth that each of you can cook at home. So, during a cold, don’t focus on fruits, vegetables, or light foods; instead, focus on sources of protein and fats. This way, you will repair much faster, and that’s all there is to it.

There are absolutely no secrets. If something in the body is inflamed, there was a reason, and the reason for the inflammation of this area is a threat. In this case, the threat could be anything—a chill, stress, danger, fright, or some reminder of that threat from the past. Recognize it, stop it, and in the future, so that this threat no longer scares you. The threat itself may remain; the threat itself may persist. You might not be able to influence the climate, yes, there is cold wind, but if internally you stop perceiving the cold wind as a threat, if you stop generating fear inside yourself that you will get sick from getting chilled, then after this threat, you will stop catching colds, you will stop getting sick, which is precisely what I have achieved.