Blessings As Cures

Dr. Jack M. Gwaltney is the creator of a web site called 'Welcome to Common Cold'. I'm puzzled about why anyone wants to feel welcome to the common cold but welcome or not, here I am at both the website and the common cold. I do not feel welcome at all. I feel like a stranger wandering the streets of a desolate land. I know no one and I neither speak nor understand the language. You see, I rarely get colds. They are not common to me. I am researching my situation, hoping for a guide book -- a map of some sort -- to lead me to a more comfortable place where I will want to be welcomed. Tissue or cloth handkerchief? Which does less harm to the environment and more comfort to me. I choose cloth handkerchief. Dr. Gwaltney tells of a research in which healthy people allowed some lab person to drop a virus into their noses and not too surprisingly 95% of them became infected with something. Of that group of people only -- only, it is emphasized -- 75% developed symptoms of a cold. I gotta hand it to Dr. Gwaltney. That's an impressive bit of research. What mainly astonishes me is why those healthy adult volunteers felt compelled to participate in the research project at all. Isn't riding the subway or going to the Post Office exposure enough? Statistics are their own misery, though. And here's one of my current statistics. Every time I sneeze my eyes close. That's enough for my brain to handle at the moment.
By the way, the best treatment for a cold, I believe, is the 'Bless you' given each time we sneeze. And who knows. Even if we don't know who, exactly, is sneezing perhaps if we all just said 'Bless you' every couple of minutes we might, indeed, cure the common cold.