Healthier without healthcare? The paradox of the common cold

Excerpt

The common cold remains a serious clinical problem worldwide that causes severe economic burden and objectively and subjectively disturbs the individual patient’s wellbeing. In the majority of cases, the disease is mild and self-limiting, but for patients with underlying chronical diseases also the common cold can become life-threatening. However, the rest of the patients, i.e. the vast majority of common cold patients, are likely to experience an acute but often harmless clinical course. Anyhow, it is exactly this majority of patients who is accessing massive treatments, which is, in the best case, solely symptomatically, but can also be represented by antibiotic therapy even in the absence of a bacterial pathogen. This seems especially common in the infancy and in the elderly, which are also the ages with higher incidence of comorbidities and more at risk of antibiotic-resistant infections [1, 2]. …