Useful hack: drinking tonic water (with quinine) reduced my breathing difficulty

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I talked a few friends of mine into hunting down some sugar-free tonic water for me. One of my friends brought me 2 liters, dropping them and running away when I opened the door :-). I started drinking it, not really thinking it would help. I drank a liter over a few hours while reading about the world coming to and end and watching serene videos of the earth from the space station set to calming music. A few hours later, still noodling around on the web, I suddenly noticed that my breathing difficulty was almost completely gone, as well as my desire to cough.

Today it is still better and I am on my second liter of tonic, so drinking tonic water when you get COVID-19 seems to be a useful hack. I am only one data point, so we cannot be sure this works. If it works for someone else, we will have a trick. If it works for lots of people, we will have a well-established technique :-). NOTE: you can poison yourself with quinine, so do not drink liter after liter of it: https://www.finanzen.ch/nachrichten/aktien/the-quinism-found...

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NOTE: you can poison yourself with quinine, so do not drink liter after liter of it: https://www.finanzen.ch/nachrichten/aktien/the-quinism-found...

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Dr. Nevin noted his concern that members of the public may even attempt to obtain therapeutic quantities of quinine through questionable channels. "Tonic water, whose bitter taste is produced by the addition of quinine or related naturally-occurring quinolines, is limited by U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations to 83 mg per liter of quinine and related cinchona alkaloids," said Dr. Nevin. "However, drinking several bottles of tonic water will result in consuming pharmaceutical quantities, and therefore potentially harmful, amounts of these drugs", said Dr. Nevin. "Tonic water is a prescription medication masquerading as a cocktail mixer."

Dr. Nevin emphasized the importance of recognizing and properly reporting adverse effects from these medications to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. "While it may be tempting to attribute anxiety, depression, paranoia, or other mental health symptoms to the psychological effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, " said Dr. Nevin, "these symptoms may be an early warning sign of idiosyncratic neurotoxicity, and must be taken seriously."

Dr. Nevin noted that adverse effects from chloroquine, hydroxychloroquine, mefloquine, quinine, and even tonic water may be reported to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's MedWatch program, at https://www.fda.gov/safety/medwatch-fda-safety-information-a....

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Hope you feel better, but you definitely don’t have covid19!

A. Covid takes at least a week or two before being symptomatic. 2 hrs is way too fast.

B. 2L of Tonic water has just 150mg (max) of Quinine. That’s not a therapeutic dose in any shape or form.

You would need to drink about 5L a day for 7 days for a therapeutic dose - safe to say that’s not realistic.

Hope you feel better - this is either cold or seasonal allergy / flu.

The symptoms that people typically notice and report for COVID-19, dry cough and shortness of breath, did not start until about 3 days later, and, further, I am not sure that the gas pump was how I got it, so your conclusion that I do not have COVID-19 is not a sound argument.

If you have the symptoms, you have evidence of the virus. The sore throat may be a red-herring, but I never get symptoms like this from normal flu or a cold, except the H1N1 flu years ago, so that is definitely not it. I am very familiar with how my body get sick.

Again, as I pointed out, the notion of a "therapeutic dose" is not discrete: it is not the case that a small amount does absolutely nothing and then suddenly when you get to the "therapeutic dose" suddenly it does something. Drugs and the body generally do not work like that. If your body is hurting for a molecule and you give it the amount biomedical researchers have concluded will have an effect, it will likely have an effect, but if you give it a bit less, it still might help. Think of any time you have needed anything: even getting one thing was a lot more than getting zero. If you listen to how doctors talk, they say such things all the time: they basically guess how much to give you and then they move the amount up and down by factors of like 2 depending on the results they get.

   When I got home, I felt a tickle in my right lymph node under my right jaw

You are saying you went from first contact with the virus to infected within a few hours?

The feeling in my lymph node could simply be something else, so that could be a red-herring. However I am familiar with how a cold and flu feel to me, and the only other time I have had shortness of breath was during the H1N1 flu season. It is a very unusual symptom for me.

This seems good to know... right up until some people do the usual silliness and overdose themselves out of their meat suit. Especially those taking meds they don't fully understand.

Should be an interesting year ahead of us.

Well I made sure to post the warning of the fact that you can overdose even on tonic water just to make sure people keep that in mind. I find it interesting that there is no such warning on the bottle. It must just be an historic artifact that quinine water is for sale in a grocery store at all. Would it really be approved for sale today, especially without a warning?

A lot of things for sale can kill you. People need to take responsibility for decisions rather than live in a bubble of ignorance.

Simply drinking too much water can kill you. From drowning if I recall. The real issue is common sense is now uncommon.

As a doctor friend said to me years ago, everything can kill you given the wrong dose. Tonic water could have a warning if thats a real concern but honestly if you're drinking huge bottles of it you're likely trying to qualify for a Darwin award after some point. I've heard anecdotes of people drinking litres of the stuff. Multiple bottles.

Be aware that a lot of the coronavirus tests are questionable anyway due to them being faulty or worse don't work. Yet another vector for uncertainty.

Good luck with your journey.

Keep us up to date, would be interesting to hear if you eventually get tested if this was indeed covid.

The tests seem to be very scarce right now, but in the future I will definitely want to know if I did have COVID-19. So hopefully antibody tests will become available so at least people who become immune will at least know that.

I got back from a big conference in SF on March 28. Came down with a sore throat on the 30th. A huge percentage of the people I know who attended the conference plus two of my three kids in SF all came down with the same thing at the same time. In other words there is a much more virulent epidemic going on in SF. R0 is probably something like 10.