The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I don't think this will work. Almost everyone gets sick sometimes. Also, the cold refers to many different viruses - "Well over 200 virus strains are implicated in causing the common cold, with rhinoviruses, coronaviruses, adenoviruses and enteroviruses being the most common". Why would taking a supplement or something nuke all of those?
The immune system has (middle school biology handwaving here) two components - adaptive and innate. Adaptive - virus replicates, immune system detects it, creates antibodies specialized to it, antibodies detect small-scale characteristics of it and destroy virus. Innate - more general response to broad signs of infection. These are all quite complicated - it's hard to imagine a way of 'boosting' the adaptive immune system that'd make it immediately expel a virus the first time it's encountered. And the innate immune system is useful, but it's not enough on its own (hence adaptive). The immune system has balances many things - how quickly you clear a disease sure, but also resource use, avoiding attacking nothing or autoimmunity, etc. And every ancient mammal that died of disease served as selection pressure, giving something that's well optimized! Would a supplement that helps with one variety of cold necessarily help with another?
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