What Actually Makes Our Throat Hurt?
Throat pain is your throat trying to heal itself, and this fight prevails itself as inflammation. It may be a reverse approach, but if instead of focusing on pain and inflammation we instead put focus on eliminating the source of the aggravation- it can shrink or eliminate the need for the inflammation being there. Most body aches and pain come from inflammation and inflammation is simply the body trying to heal itself. This puffing up of tissue, allowing for blood supply to carry nutrients in and carry debris out, can really hurt. The same thing is happening when your throat hurts and it is fighting a bacteria or virus that has set up shop in there. So next time you feel nose, puffiness, eyes watering and throat hurting, you can feel a little better knowing that this section is working hard trying to keep the virus from getting to the rest of your body.
Our nasal cavities, mouth, and throat area can become a hotbed for viruses (and they work like a virus incubator), so it makes a lot of sense to do things that eliminate or at least mitigate the virus while it’s still up in this area.
The primary point of entry for respiratory viruses is our nose and often it seems the sequence of a cold is: first nose and nasal passages, down into the throat, and then chest. Swabbing or rinsing the entry areas with things that kill and neutralize viruses, makes a lot of sense in decreasing the amount of viral load this same area produces. The goal should be in decreasing the amount of viral load, so we won’t be as affected, and enough exposure to keep our immune system strong and able to map and recognize the virus. Once this happens, our awesome innate immune system often takes care of things without us even knowing that we made contact with the virus.
Something that is, very intriguing to me is antiseptics, how they function and how they can easily destroy viruses and bacteria. My favorite antiseptic is hydrogen peroxide, it actually generates oxygen as part of the process when it is working destroying viruses and bacteria, and oxygen is probably the single most important thing out of many important things that help us in sustaining life.
Hydrogen peroxide: this is what I find that really works when being exposed to something or when feeling a sore throat coming on: I use q-tips/cotton swabs to swab my nasal passages with hydrogen peroxide, rinse mouth with it, gargle, spit it out and then swallow just enough that is left in my mouth to coat my throat a little further down where the gargling didn’t reach. I don’t do this a lot since hydrogen peroxide can also harm good bacteria.
There is more information on this and other therapeutics at www.wadeyoder.com/therapeutics (also available in Spanish)
