The Perks Of Investing In Common Cold Prevention
Looking for a reason to invest your time in common cold prevention? Well, what if I told you that an investment in fighting the common cold will give you guaranteed returns? And not only will these returns have interest, they'll also be given to you in cash.
How's that? Fact of the matter is, fighting the common cold is a very lucrative business. Pharmaceutical companies make a lot of money selling products that are supposed to alleviate the symptoms of the common cold (yes, up 'til now, no sure-fire cure has been developed). And since we tend to visit our doctors or drive to the nearest drug store whenever we catch the bug, we wind up throwing our hard-earned cash away for drugs that don't even work. What's worse, that's only the tip of the iceberg.
Consider these statistics from Wikipedia.org: the common cold amounts to almost $8 billion in physician visits, nearly $3 billion in over the counter drugs, and $400 million in prescriptions. Couple that with the fact that parents collectively miss about 126 million work days a year to stay home and care for their kids (who miss up to an estimated 190 million school days) and another 150 million to stay home on the days they are struck by the malady themselves, and the price tag for catching a cold turns out to be upwards of $20 billion.
Reason enough to know a little something about common cold prevention? Yeah, I figured as much. We may not be able to individually line our pockets with $20 billion, but we can get our due share in the amount of dollars we save for doing away with frequent trips to the doctor, piles of useless medication, and more sick days than we can count. And if knowing and practicing a bit of common cold prevention is the only catch, then why not?
Fighting the common cold isn't as hard as people think, after all. All it really takes is to wash our hands frequently, stay out of range of people's coughs and sneezes (and covering our mouth with a tissue or handkerchief when we're the ones coughing up a storm), get adequate rest, and drink the recommended 8 glasses of water a day. Of course, it wouldn't hurt to eat and live healthy either.
If fact, if you end up following this advice, your investment in common cold prevention will not only keep your cash in your pockets, it'll lead to a healthier and better life. Now that's nothing to sneeze at.