We received information today from our medical insurance company listing medication that they supply once a year.  This included a set of things for cold prevention.

I’ve gotten used to the Japanese wearing masks in the winter but I hadn’t heard about Isodine Gargle until one of my doctors asked me if I was using it. She was concerned that my thyroid function was being affected by me gargling too often with products that contained iodine. For me it was an incredibly strange question but it seems that lots of people in Japan gargle with a mouth wash when they arrive home.

I’m not sure what a medical company in the UK would suggest for cold prevention. Maybe a medicated hand-wash, as there was much talk about these after the swine flu scare, but I can’t think of anything else.  All the other things for cold prevention that come to my mind aren’t backed up with much science.  My mother would encourage me to take echinacea which used to make me laugh as she pronounced it like “itchy kneea”.  There was a time when Vitamin C was considered to be the best thing to take to prevent a cold.  And now I hear people talking about Zinc.

When I was younger I spent more time arguing about these things.  But I was never persuasive enough to convince my grandmother that I wouldn’t “catch me death” by going out in the winter with wet hair.