Dr. Chheda – 🤧 The typical symptoms of a cold you might notice is a runny nose, but what really is happening with all the other symptoms?

Initially, you get a little drip, post-nasal drip down the back of your throat, so your throat might feel a little scratchy. So your kids may not want to eat as much. They might say “my throat hurts.” It’s not so much that you can really tell, but you feel you get that scratchiness first.

And then the next day you produce enough mucus that you actually see the running nose. And then when that running mucus increases, you’ll not only see it from the outside, but you get more mucus draining down, and kids will automatically cough to try to keep all that mucus out of their lungs.

We don’t want to stop the cough. If we stop the cough, the mucus will drain into the lungs and can turn into a pneumonia. So we want them to cough. Now, kids are not great at coughing out – they cough up and then they swallow the mucus into their stomach.

Now their stomach’s full of mucus, so they don’t want to eat because they’re full of mucus, and they might throw up because mucus is very irritating. So they’ll throw up some mucus, or they might have diarrhea cause all that mucus has gotta come out somehow. So you have more slimy poops.

So yes, you can get vomiting and diarrhea with a cold, and it’s all related to the mucus. Once you stop the mucus, the runny nose stops, the post-nasal drip and the sore throat stops, the cough stops, the vomiting stops, the diarrhea stops. Mucus is the issue. So those want to deal with the mucus part of it, not the other symptoms. All the symptoms will go away once you stop the mucus.