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Personal Narrative: The Fisherman's Friend

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At the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009, it felt as though I had ten consecutive sore throat/cold illnesses. As soon as I got well from one, I’d catch another. I think one of them may have been swine flu, as that was around the time of a major epidemic. I was so run down, it seemed, that my immune system didn’t have the means to fight every new strain of the cold virus, or anything else. One day I felt so fed up of it all that I decided to take every kind of vitamin pill in the house, and damn well Get Better. For some reason, this worked. I started feeling better within half an hour. I don’t know whether it was the vitamins, the resolve, or that I just happened to be getting better anyway, but I did. And then a rather strange thing …show more content…

It came on when I was lying in bed, felt a tickle in my throat, but couldn’t be bothered to get up and get a Fisherman’s Friend. The Fisherman’s Friend could wait until morning, I thought. By morning, unfortunately, my throat was hurting like the Sore Throats of Olde (i.e. 2008). (Moral of the story: eat Fisherman’s …show more content…

What is actually happening to make the throat hurt, I wondered? So I Googled “the science of sore throats”. Previously I’d made the assumption that the pain was caused by little beasties sitting on the lining of the throat and, like, chomping on it, or something. Strangely enough, this isn’t the case. The pain is caused by the lining of the throat swelling up as it fills with fluids which are combating the infection, and pressing on the nerves. Therefore, the best way to stop it hurting, if we are to apply science to it, is to reduce the swelling. This means that the simplest thing to do is gargling with salt water, as the high concentration draws fluids out of the swollen throat lining by osmosis. So this time, rather than eating stronger throat sweets full of unknown chemicals with weird names, I mainly gargled salt water. I ate Fisherman’s Friends, too, although I do get sick of the taste of them when I eat too many (and I’ve never been sure whether it’s possible to overdose on Fisherman’s Friends – they may be mainly made from natural ingredients, but many “natural ingredients” are still chemicals – for example, eucalyptus is pretty toxic in large

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