You can kill a virus in a single day if you do it properly.

You must start treatment as soon as possible. If you are not sure, its better to cure fake common cold, then not to cure real common cold.

1. Starting from first symptoms, take 2-4g of Vitamin C powder every 30 minutes or 1 hour. You need to reach the point when your stomach starts to rumble and keep it that way entire day. If you get diarrhea, keep taking C but reduce the dose (do not increase the time). You shouldn't aim for diarrhea. You will need from 30 - 100g of Vitamin C in general case. The nastier the virus, the more you need (see the graph below). If you wait, you will need even more. Every hour delay will get you to 3 new generations of viruses. It would be good to wake every 3 hours over night to continue C usage. Note: flatulence will be nasty. Hydrate. Good idea is to take it with magnesium. This step is what all animals on Earth do. If you can't tollerate acid, mix it with baking soda until acid is neutralized.

1. N-Acetyl-Cystein, 600-1200 mg will help with glutathion recycling, you need this one, its primary endogenous antioxidant. It also directly helps with viruses.

2. Zinc-Gluconate, 3x50mg, helps with common cold a lot. During winter you need to preload yourself. Take each day 50mg.

3. Ehinacea drops. Add to your vitamin C water, every few hours.

4. Multivitamin, you will do calorie restriction and you need to prevent acute phase induced deficiencies. Actually, this argument is true for all vitamin related steps.

5. Coenzime Q10 - your immune system is raging, it needs energy. 3x100mg.

6. Vitamin D - 10000 IU. Vitamin A 10000 IU if you didn't get it via multivitamin (usually all contain such amounts).

7. Zero carb diet. Glucose competes with vitamin C. Calorie restriction, anorexic response is what your body does anyway. You need to promote autophagy as viruses are intracelular creatures and you need to prevent energy waste to digestion.Chicken soup, it has that anti-viral fatty acid and its easily digestible, and mildly anti-inflamatory. Coconut oil for fast energy and as anti-viral [its even used with AIDS virus] and easy digestion. Try not to move if you don't have to. Cats sleep all the time when have a virus.

8. Vitamin E as mixed tocopherols, 2x200IU. Prevents oxidative stress and works in synergy with C.

9. Do not take any drugs. Your system knows the best, do not interfere, give it resources. Standard medicine doesn't have anything for viruses yet, and drugs will reduce symptoms and immunity.

All steps are mandatory.

Tomorrow, you will not have a virus any more. You will continue to take lots of vitamin C (every 3-4 hours 4g) for the next 2 days and all other vitamins in similar doses until your body heals properly but you will generally feel good.

The hardest thing is to properly dose vitamin C and you will need some experience with this, it probably can't be done correctly until you experience it few times and know how to recognize specific markers. As you can see from the graph, its very easy to make error in dosing of vitamin C, because symptoms do not reduce until you are very close to the bowel tolerance. One of the points of extra supplements is to make this error margin higher then 10% which is what graph shows for ascorbate alone.

The point is not only to kill the virus but to prevent opportunistic infections from taking over your gums, joints, ears etc... i.e. chronic life long infections.

The protocol needs the name so... let it be

Dr Rambo Protocol (thx Grover :)

Sleep, water, tea, bone broth, extra zinc, vitamin d and vitamin c, repeat until I feel well again.

If I have a runny nose, I let it run. This is uncomfortable and inconvenient, but it is our evolved way of dealing with the problem and it works in a few hours.

So glad to find this asked, on my sick day no less.

My key instruments of battle were rest (laying around the house basically all day) and hydration: hot water with ginger or lemon juices added.

I actually consumed a lot of coconut products, as I seemed to have a craving. After reading through this page, maybe my body knew best and was craving it for its antiviral properties. So I ate a lot of coconut cream and oil. I do think getting sick is pretty natural though, so I don't get too aggressive with supplementation and medication (even herbal). Plus I'm lazy.

I learned the other day that bitters (the kind used in cocktails) are medicinal and at one point could be bought in pharmacies to cure a lot. They're usually made from herbs and lemon, lime, and orange peels, and some brands were even created by physicians. A bartender told me to put a few drops in gingerale for health. I'll probably start fermenting my own paleo gingerbeer/ale/thing soon anyway, and I think that would be great to drink with some bitters when one has a cold.

I try to stay well-fed and un-stressed. My take is that you want your body to be in tip-top shape to heal itself and avoid opportunistic bacterial infections that may follow an initial viral infection. I was exposed to a common cold a couple weeks back and was hoping that I'd avoid it. No luck, but I never really progressed too much past a stuffy nose for a couple days, whereas I'd usually get a sore throat for 2-3 days which would progress into 5-7 days of nasal congestion. My first cold after being paleo, certainly easier than any cold in recent memory.

For the sore throat, put about 1/4 to 1/2 a teaspoon of salt in room temperature water and gargle with it (use a smallish mouthful for each gargle). You can do this several times a day. I do it at least once an hour.

It REALLY worked on the sore throats I USED to get.

I haven't been sick since going paleo. That was close to a year ago. Occasionally I'll feel like I'm fighting off something, but it's never gotten full-blown.

If I do, hot tea, broth, hot showers, and sleep sound nice. I'm in the conservative meds camp - I try to avoid meds, but will take medication for symptom management if I feel the symptom is causing more harm than good. For example, I don't treat a low-grade fever or productive cough, but will treat a high fever or a cough that is simply causing greater throat irritation.

I'm going to echo a few folks here - started feeling like cold was imminent yesterday afternoon, started sneezing uncontrollably. Got very congested, complete with itchy throat, head & sinus throbbing bit as well.

Took 1000 mgs of C right before leaving for mandatory dinner w/kids, drank tea & water all through dinner (mongolian stir-fry, no rice/noodles), came home to take another 1000 mgs of C and a 2nd 10K dose of D (that's what I regularly take in the AM, doubled up yesterday) & crawled right into bed. At 8 pm.

Was out cold until midnight, then up to use the restroom & take another 1000 mgs of C. Back to sleep until 6:00 am.

Today? I feel: fine. Completely fine. (Still repeated the C twice this AM already, though...)

(I do regularly do sinus irrigation each morning in the shower with the NeilMed system to deal with allergies/prevent sinus issues; that's another tool in my arsenal to add in a 2nd rinse in the evening. Crashed out before I could do that last night, though!)

When I feel a cold coming on, I eat a clove of raw garlic with a spoonful of honey several times a day. (It doesn't taste bad with honey.)

It works far better than anything from a drug store I've ever tried.

Extra sleep......

Homemade pastured chicken broth and a warm mist humidifier the entire Fall and Winter season at night. Sleep.

I haven't had a real cold since I started eating paleo. Usually if I feel something coming on I try to eat extra-well, and I drink a lot more fluids than usual.

Bone broth, bone broth and more bone broth.

Hot lemon water with cayenne pepper, teas. Lots of hot liquids.

I rarely get sick but I've gotten some persistent hacking cough things in the past few years, where I wake up in the middle of the night and can't stop coughing. When that happens, I use the max strength dextramethorphan (too lazy to check the spelling on that).

I've never been a medicator, prefer to let my body fight whatever it is. Sore throats and coughs are the exception when really bad.

Sleep, sleep, sleep. Water, water water. And I make sure the diet is plenty adequate with special attention to vitamin c.

One of my favorite ideas is what a buddy of mine used to call "chemotherapy", which pretty much consists of an evening of drinking a lot of whiskey so as to create an unwelcome environment for whatever bug was attempting to take up residence. Much like real chemotherapy, results are mixed, and the treatment may be worse than the disease. I've used it successfully a good half dozen times, but very unsuccessfully 2 or 3 times (and then you are hungover and sick, bleh!). This method has always appealed to me though because my body seems hell bent on seeking out self destructive behaviors when I start to get sick, like suddenly going for a run (I am not a runner), eating a lot of sugar, or doing yard work in the cold without weather appropriate clothing.

Other than sleep, really hot showers, and as much chamomile tea as I can stomach, my go to treatment is to bust out the juicer, and run a whole bunch of parsley, a little ginger, 2 cloves of garlic, carrots, an orange, and a lemon through it. The resulting slurry tastes and feels pretty darn medicinal. It seems to work well no matter where I am in the cycle of the cold. A little vodka thrown in helps if I have a cough that keeps me up at night too. I've also pulled out of a nosedive into what looked to be a particularly nasty cold by eating a whole jar of kim chi.

Astragalus tincture has also worked well for me. And if it is a virus that has long overstayed it's welcome I take oregano oil and something called Phytogen by Thorne Research which has echinacea, astragalus, osha root, schisandra, and goldenseal.

Oil of Oregano works great, a few drops usually takes care of a cold overnight. Besides that, upping vit.C and vit.D, plenty of water, rest and chicken soup.

Grass fed beef knuckle bone broth and as much sleep as I can get.

What works for me is taking probiotics L. acidolphilus and saccharomyces boulardii. I also consume kefir, drink plenty of water, take extra vitamin D, consume bone broth, and take some elderberry extract. Boosting my gut flora seems to help the immune system in a big way.

Also I use Dr NeilMed nasal rinse in a squeeze bottle which has better pressure and flow than a neti pot.

I'd echo everything others have said, but I usually end up making a huge pot of really spicy tom yum soup with homemade bone broth.

Beyond that, tea with lemon and ginger, vitamin C & D, etc.

Oh, and SLEEP!

I make Hot and Sour Soup - or at least the broth, if I don't have the other ingredients on hand. I actually have gotten up in the middle of the night and dumped this in the crockpot so I have it to sip on for the entire next day!

http://mypaleocrockpot.blogspot.com/2011/09/paleo-ish-hot-and-sour-soup.html

Chicken broth cuts phlegm. Or chicken fat, rather. That's alli know.

Looks like I've got a mild cold right now. Thought it was hay fever, but now I think it's a virus. Woke up coughing this morning. The campbell's chicken broth is standing by.

Lots of fluids. Lots of Vitamin D and C.

This may not be very paleo but it works 100% of the time for me.....I suck on Cold-Eze every 2 hours for 2 days, increase my vit-c and D, and add extra bcaa's. I usually do this at the first sign of a cold and it never gets worse. If I am in a full blown cold then its gone in a day or two.

Cayenne pepper or vitamin C does the trick for me.

In my 20s, when I felt a cold coming on, I would go for a run, believing it would strengthen my immune system, via sweating, respiration, and so forth. I probably also did a host of other holistic type stuff, like EmergenC packets and lots of herb tea. What I recall, though, was the running. Looking back, I surmise my immune system was already in good enough shape (was a serious distance runner though seldom skirted overtraining) not to be too badly set back by the running. Or, who knows, maybe the running actually helped me get well, or as I tended to think about it, helped me avoid getting sicker.