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.
1 Acute coughs usually begin rapidly and are often due to a cold, flu, or sinus infection. They usually go away after 3 weeks. 2  Subacute coughs last 3 to 8 weeks.  Chronic coughs last longer than 3 weeks.
The average duration of cough, according to a recent study, is 18 days. If you think that seems like a long time, youâre not alone. A telephone survey by the same researchers found most people expected a cough to last seven to nine days. That dissonance between how long people expect cough to last and how long it really does sends a lot of people to the doctor. Cough is the most common patient complaint to primary-care physicians and accounts for more than 30 million doctorâs visits annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.