Wow - that is actually really helpful.  I actually forgot to mention
that there was blood in my mucous.  Unfortunately, I just saw the
doctor and he just took a swab of the inside of my mouth.  Not sure
how long it will take for the lab people to come back with something
or if even they will come back with the right diagnosis considering
the delicacy of taking a culture.

Anyway, he gave me a nasal spray which I'll try.  The funny thing is
that this illness isn't severe enough that it stops me from working...
and from an evolutionary perspective that may be why it is spreading
so rampantly - since people will continue to interact with each
other.  I live on the west coast and the doctor mentioned that "there
is something going around".

Novice

How would they know? They don't take the samples out of patients. Nurses and
doctors do.

Pseudomonas is a common bacterium, but it rarely causes problems, especially
in the sinuses. The only people it commonly causes problems are people with
endotrachial tubes and people with cystic fibrosis. It also causes problems
in the immunocomprised.

Or better yet, ask your doctor.

Novice,
It probably did start as viral but since I have Mitral Valve Prolapse
I didn't take a chance. When it got really bad I saw my doctor and we
agreed on Augmentin 875 twice a day. We didn't bother doing a culture.
Its all cleared up now.

Anyone else could have left it alone to run its course but you
shouldn't tempt fate if you have MVP or any other heart or lung
problems.

Nadine

On 2/14/07 12:46 PM, in article
1171485975.386160.68110@m58g2000cwm.googlegroups.com,

Another way is to irrigate 200 cc of pulsatile saline. That clears the nasal
stuff. Then catch the next 200 cc in a sterile container - that's from the
sinuses usually.

Unfortunately no, for the reasons we already stated.  Medical diagnosis
is not an exact science, when all you have to work with is
symptomatology and vital signs.  Heck, even the stethoscope was a major
advance in diagnosis--but you're not trained in its use, right?  And how
do you propose giving yourself an otic examination***?

Basically, if you live in North America, it's quite simple:  The cold
season lasts from September (start of school for kids) to March, after
which the incidence of colds declines.  So if you present with cold
symptoms in that time frame, it's most likely to be a cold.  And there's
no reason to wait for a diagnosis to start treating the most annoying
symptoms.  Treat them yourself, and be patient.

I think that's the most frustrating part of having a cold:  You have to
just SIT RIGHT THERE and wait for your immune system to kick in and
gradually deal with it.  Nothing can be done to speed that up--not
vitamins, not herbs, nothing.  It has a complex choreography and it has
to go thru its dance of leucocytes and phagocytes and antibodies till it
gets to the end.

"A cold, left untreated, will last up to 14 days; but with proper
treatment, it should last no longer than 2 weeks."
   -- Anon

*** An elegant solution:  Marry a nurse practitioner!  NP's ought to be
the most eligible bachelorettes in America.  :-)

<...>

Why not marry a gerontologist? That way, you're set for life.

Kind of like the old joke of the girl marrying a banker, an actor, a
preacher and an undertaker: 1 for the money, 2 for the show, 3 to get ready
and 4 to go.

Seriously, the important thing about colds was quote before: if treated
properly, colds last 14 days, if left untreated, they last 2 weeks.

Jeff

Steven, as a female physician--who works with wonderful male physician
assistants-- I don't get the joke about the nurse practitoner. The
current classes in medical schools are half female, FYI. And, this is
not a joke, some of my best friends are nurse practitioners.
 My family gets colds like everyone else. The only benefit they get
from having me, and my prescription pad, and my rapid strep cultures,
is that they can avoid some office visits and copays, and I can often
get a colleague on the phone, in a crisis.
Judy

Oh  Jezee.  Where to start.

With appologies to the doctors here, a little logic would go a long
way in medicine. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,
especially where bacteria are concerned.

You guys need to take a gander over at the National Science Foundation
Center for Biofilm Engineering at Montana State.

http://www.biofilmsonline.com/cgi-bin/biofilmsonline/ed_misconception.html

"Over one hundred years ago, Robert Koch made one of the most
important conceptual and technological breakthroughs in the history of
microbiology.  He developed the methods to create a solid nutrient
media in order to grow and isolate pure cultures of microorganisms.

The importance of this discovery to advances in medical, agricultural
and industrial microbiology would be hard to overestimate. The
dividends these techniques returned have positively affected the lives
of nearly everyone on the planet. The training of generations of
microbiologists has been based, to a significant degree, on the
investigation of the properties of pure cultures and the elucidation
of the properties of these organisms one at a time. As productive as
this strategy has been, it tends to perpetuate a misconception. In
fact, pure cultures are virtually absent in nature.

This suggests that most of what we know about microorganisms has been
learned under laboratory conditions that are not representative of how
microorganisms are found in nature.  Microorganisms, like other
organisms, exist in assemblages or communities where a variety of
interactions exist. Mutualism, commensalism, antagonism, and
saprophytism are but a few of the more common interactions known to
exist among microorganisms and multicellular organisms."

Go to pubmed and type in  "biofilm sinusitis" and see what you get.

I agree about the Vitamin C. All the mammals except the primates have
metabolic cycles that end in vitamin C, which means that there is a
much higher level of vitamin C in their epithelial tissues than in
ours.. Mice, rats and rabbits do not make good experimental animal
models for research on sinus related problems because they don't get
sinusitis, at least partly because animals that express high levels of
Vitamin C seem resistant to biofilm attachment.

Healthy Sinuses have goblet cells that exude a fluid like tears and
cilia, and as long as the cilia are healthy and kicking pathogenic
bacteria, fungi and actinomycetes like staph and pseudomonas and other
bacteria that are inhaled on dust at can be around without causing a
problem.  However, if a virus kills off the goblet cells and cilia
then the little beasties have a chance to form Voltron.  In this case
Voltron being a bio-film. Once one of the attachment specialists such
as psudo or e-coli anchors itself, all manner of other bacteria with
compatible metabolisms can grow and prosper in their special nitches
in the goo and form a sac looking suspiciously like a polyp.  The fact
is that most bacterial species will ONLY only grow if they can find
the goo, not as monocultures, so their role in disease is only now
being investigated. The other thing is that some of the bacteria and
other beasties that form the biofilm enter a stasis state where they
are very hard to kill because they are barely conducting life
processes at all, which is why antibiotics like the penicillin are
ineffective, the presister cells just wait until the antibiotic goes
away and then they repopulate.
Appropriate antibiotics in conjunction with biofilm breakers have been
used sucessfully, but the likelihood of getting the proper antibiotic
is limited:

1. Because doctors don't realize of the limitations of present western
microbiology, (and they REALLY do not appreciate offer to teach them
episcopic differential interference contrast microscopy so that they
can see what it really there, all patients are dangerous idiots or
terrorists of course. Even when this could be readily be observed with
anyone with CS tissue samples and an electron microscope and the
abiltiy to prepare freeze fracture samples it has taken a literal act
of congress to get doctors to LOOK). They assume that if the cultures
are negative, then the condition is viral or allergic, not realizing
that once the biofilm forms and quorum sensing chemical messages are
being produced, the compatible bacteria don't float free around the
area but make a bee line for the biofilm where they get down to being
part of the teeming team.   Even where disrupters are used, biofilm
basement bacteria such as e-coli work themselves inside the top layer
of cells, so to get rid of them takes something that will incapacitate
their ability to infect a new layer of cells, and then keeping it up
for at least 3 weeks until the infected top layer has been shed.

2. Because anti-antibiotic hysteria is pervasive in the medical
community your chance of getting timely and effective antibiotic
therapy is better if you are a cow, dog, cat or pig than if you are a
human. And if the antibiotic use is preventive, then your chances are
only half that. Doc Grossen's and Haun's patients are incredibly
unusually fortunate. All the antibiotics are developed on animals and
they are approved for veterinary use long before they are approved for
human use, and most of the tonnage of antibiotics is used on animals.
The idea that indiscrimate irresponsible antibiotic prescription
practices are responsible for antibiotic resistance is pervasive in
medical literature and the press and pretty much or completely ignores
the fact that e-coli and other entro-bacteria can be inhaled as dust
and readily transfer antibiotic resistant plasmids to other species.
You don't have to be dosed to have your bacteria become resistant.
Just breathing may do it eventually.

3. Because sinusitis is not taken as a serious gateway disease, which
it very well may be.
I would be VERY interested to see an epidemiological study of the
association between Chronic Sinusitis and Alzheimer's for instance.
As we learn more, I think that the approach to this disease will
change dramatically.

Meanwhile, while we wait for the myths of medicine to catch up with
the much more complicated, messy reality, we have to get by as we can
without assumeing that a diagnosis or prescription antibiotics and or
antifungals will be forthcoming.

If you are stuck doing the best you can it can be useful to know that
various Lacto bacillus has metabolic processes that end in lactic
acid, which is incompatible with the goo formers, so to the extent you
can get them established they help and  Vitamin C, MSM, Sodium
Nitrate, Lactic acid, and EDTA indivually and in combination have been
used successfully to detach certain biofilms.

Thanks for the feedback.  I csme to the same conclusion , after searching
through the calcium leaching issue.   That ascorbates of many essential
elements are considered to be better than to take only ascorbic acid alone.
The reduction of copper could also be an issue in some people too.  I drink
a little coffee or tea and eat chocolate quite often so I probably have
pretty high copper already.
I'm thinking heavily about having a hair sample analized to see how my
elemental status is.   Although it's not a total picture I'm sure that I'm
not in perfect balance.  Knowing my toxic levels would be nice too.  I'm
going to try Calcium Ascorbate and try to find an ascorbate complex , if I
can ,so I don't throw my system too far out of balance.  I could read for
months and not fully understand the complex element reactions in the body.
It's an little like messing with my computer registry , not knowing what I'm
doing is a lot of trial and error.  "So far so good" the guy said as he was
falling 100 stories off the building.