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The Great Winter Lie:
Decades of Falsehoods About Colds
What we think we know about colds is wrong — and it’s costing us more than we imagine.
I still vividly remember that winter afternoon in Boston when my grandmother chased me around the house with a towel, frantically insisting that I dry my hair. “You’ll catch pneumonia!” she shouted, echoing a belief so deeply rooted in our culture that questioning it seemed blasphemous. Little did I know that moment would become the catalyst for a personal journey to unravel the myths that have shaped our understanding of the common cold.
As a health journalist for over a decade, I’ve witnessed a quiet revolution in how we understand these conditions that are as common as they are misunderstood. The uncomfortable truth is that much of what we consider “common wisdom” about colds is nothing more than an elaborate set of fictions passed down from generation to generation.
The Myth of 200 Enemies
When we think of a cold, we tend to imagine it as a single adversary. The reality is much scarier: we’re facing an army of more than 200 different viruses, each equipped with its own strategies to invade our immune system. This revolutionary discovery by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) not only explains why we can catch multiple colds in a…
