Miracle Cure

There’s a flu bug going around that lays people up with a cough, stuffy nose, and fever; I’m trying to fight it off.

Last night I had a restless sweaty-chilly night and woke up all achy, my throat scratchy and sore.

So I instituted my standard cure for the common cold—massive doses of vitamin C mixed with Echinacea and orange juice—and, at the risk of jinxing myself, it seems like it might be working.

In that last sentence, though, are two claims that, were I a student in the Critical Thinking class I’m teaching this quarter, I would be taught to be skeptical about.

The first is that vitamin C or Echinacea are useful at all in combating colds or flu. It’s my understanding that not only have they not been proven to be effective in either preventing or speeding up recovery from illness, they’ve actually been shown to be ineffective. Neither bombing one’s system with vitamin C nor drenching it with Echinacea extract helps at all in clinical trials.

And yet in my own experience, it seems to work. But maybe I’m just committing the fallacy of false cause or post hoc ergo propter hoc.

And then second, the idea that I might jinx my recovery by believing that I am recovering is, by all accounts, pure superstition. It’s the sort of view that arises from our tendency to commit what psychologists call a “confirmation bias,” our tendency to find evidence for what we already believe.

It’s like how I only notice the times I get a flat tire after mentioning that I haven’t gotten a flat tire in a while. (And by the way, I’m not doing that here; I have gotten a flat recently, so back off, cycling gods.)

So is it irrational to have either or both of these beliefs? No doubt, but I’m still going to pound more calcium ascorbate and extract of Echinacea.

I just won’t tell my students.