Well, the body does heal itself, most of the time. But her description of a cold puzzles me - is it normal to take medicine (as opposed to just tea or soup) for an ordinary cold? Because taking drugs for something as minor as a cold is utterly alien to me.
A little less anecdotally, a cold is a viral infection, so medicine will mostly target only its symptoms, not the underlying cause. If the symptoms are bearable, then this looks like a bad idea to me - I'm inclined to think the symptoms are there for a reason.
Being unable to breathe through your nose serves little purpose I can think of.
Your 'most of Europe' doesn't really fit with my experience of the UK.
As a generally healthy Dane, when I get the cold or the flu I generally don't take any medications for it, and neither does most of the people I know.
The rest just makes you feel a little less awful. All the studies show the current OTC remedies don’t shorten illness duration (which conversely means they don’t lengthen it either).
The “evolutionary response” hypothesis is a lesser form of “smart people going with their gut instead of science” - which is partly how we’ve gotten into this mess in the first place.
Smart people seem to get important things wrong quite a lot.
He knew a lot about being ill.
Some people do find it virtuous to suffer a little, but that's another matter.
The “symptom” is an immune system response to a pathogen.
To me, it seems rational to default to assuming the symptom has an evolved purpose, a mechanism in fighting infection, and not counteract it unless absolutely necessary.
E.g. quick random Google: https://bmjopenrespres.bmj.com/content/3/1/e000118
"The commonest form of cough is caused by upper respiratory tract infection and has no benefit to the host. The virus hijacks this natural defence mechanism in order to propagate itself through the population."
People ask me what “I’m taking” for a cold but there’s not much you can do about a viral infection other than take ARV’s (which is quite extreme!)
The whole Vitamin C thing is a total myth although I do believe a good diet helps.
Also important for bone health. Most people would benefit from vitamin D3 supplements in the darkest months.
Why not? There's no nobility to suffering if you don't have to.
Propensity to take or avoid unnecessary medication is something that probably aligns to certain psychological traits, as well as being picked up from parents and peers in childhood. Also, some people suffer more than others in treatable ways (my mother regularly had headaches, I rarely do).
I personally avoid unnecessary medication (not in any active sense, but more like "ehh it's not really bad enough and it'll be over soon") whenever possible and could probably count on one hand the number of times I've taken any in the last 10 years, but on the other hand I have friends who take great joy in having something (or things) on hand for just about any ailment which someone might mention in passing.
One possible reason is that some people weigh the tax on their liver and/or stomach more strongly than a brief temperature. These medications, although amazing and broadly safe, aren't altogether without tradeoffs.
I guess for me it's that I don't suffer very much from the symptoms of minor illnesses, and possibly that I want to save my liver damage for alcohol.
You may make your choices, and I shall respect them. It was the implied criticism in the original post that I responded to really (confirmed in other posts when the same poster called any other habit "over medicating").
For me the symptoms themselves can pose problems - if I get inflammation of the nose and ear canals during a cold, and they block up, I seem to be prone to ear infections. Decongestants etc are a good preventative measure for that as well as making the whole thing less crappy.
Truthfully, ever since I started walking a few miles a day outside I very rarely get colds or "minor" illnesses.
In the past I would get a cold maybe once every year or 2, and then it would suck for about a week while riding it out. I used to get bad colds too. To the point where when I was kid they wanted to put tubes in my ears to drain liquid out. But the last time I had a cold was ~5 years ago.
I remember last year I spent 6 hours sitting directly next to someone on a plane who looked severely ill with cold-like symptoms. Sniffing every 20 seconds, clearing his throat often, looked super pale, major bags under his eyes. Overall looked miserable. I thought I was done for, but somehow managed to not get sick in potentially one of the worst situations possible for getting sick.
I don't know what to make of it but I remember my dad telling me that often times the kids of a farmer are the healthiest people around and the moral there is they were constantly around things that might not be considered sanitary so their bodies built up a natural immunity. Basically, mild exposure to non-ideal things helps you out a lot (which includes vaccinations for more serious non-common germs of course).