To minimize the health risks of a non-mainstream treatment. 1  Discuss it with your doctor. It might have side effects or interact with other medicines. 2  Find out what the research says about it. 3  Choose practitioners carefully. 4  Tell all of your doctors and practitioners about all of the different types of treatments you use.
Skewed expectations may be one reason why antibiotics are over-prescribed, even for viral infections. In a phone survey, researchers asked 493 people how long they thought a case of ACI (acute cough illness, a.k.a. a cold that causes coughing) should last. At the same time, they looked at the existing medical literature to see how long ACI actually lasts on average. Survey respondents guessed that a cough should last 7-9 days. The literature, by contrast, showed that the mean duration of a cough is almost 18 days. Advertisement.
Most uncomplicated colds, which often lead to coughs, last between eight and nine days, but about 25 percent last two weeks, and 5-10 percent last three weeks. How quickly your cold is resolved has a lot to do with your general lifestyle habits and the state of your immune system.