Medicine: Cold Comfort

There is nothing like common salt for the common cold, says Dr. Harry Adler of Elmira, N.Y. He recommends an ounce of a strong salt solution at the first sniffle, and more ten hours later, as the nose begins to run. No matter how thirsty the patient gets, he should drink very little water. This is the absolute contradiction of a favorite cold recipe. Dr. Adler says no harm is done by his salt—the body already contains 30 times that much. Only drawback: for some people, brine is an emetic.

Dr. Adler says salt keeps fluid in the tissues instead of letting it run out of the nose. The fluid is eventually drawn off in the blood and discharged in the urine. The salt goes off that way, too, within 24 hours. Keeping the nose dry, he believes, makes a patient less susceptible to secondary infection. His method has been used in Elmira Reformatory’s hospital for four years—about 1,300 colds so far—and Dr. Adler says the patients’ noses are drier, their temperatures lower, than on standard treatment.

Dr. Adler hit on the salt treatment because he was impressed by “the confusion of thought as to the cause and management of the common cold,” and because he was convinced that most remedies in-use were either “useless or harmful.” On his blacklist: astringent, oily or silver-salt nose drops; fruit juices; laxatives; fresh air; alkaline drinks; fluids. The only remedies besides salt in which he sees any merit are sulfadiazine sprays, vaccines (sometimes), sun lamp treatments and sun baths.

From this latest pragmatic pronouncement on a common but still mysterious human ill, laymen could take but cold comfort: after 2,394 years of medical science, doctors still disagree on the cause & cure of the common cold.