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Comment by rdedev | Hacker News Reader

My goto protocol is, wait for 3 days before starting any meds. If symptoms get worse than tolerable or new symptoms pop up then start some thing.

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There are a fair number of illnesses that will kill you or irreversibly damage you in three days.

Not everything, just enough that this is bad advice without serious qualification.

That’s a low intersection of medical situations where you have three days to live, but can be saved by an OTC treatment.

I'm trying to think of a single one off-hand.

Possibly a very high fever or some sort of dehydrating bowel disease?

I guess you could call applying pressure to and binding a wound OTC, and you could possibly die if you simply choose not to do that?

Take the wound scenario. If you bandage it up but start getting a fever the next day then its a new symptom and it's better you see a doc

Best I have would be an allergic reaction (possibly with constant exposure where you just keep consuming the allergen). Suffering with increasingly restricted airways and not taking an antihistamine or epipen.

> If symptoms get worse than tolerable…

I feel like this covers that problem, no? Surely the kill-you-in-three-days problems must be very painful? And if they aren’t very painful, I wouldn’t be going to the ER anyways, so I’d die before my scheduled visit — surely at least a week out in most places I’ve visited

You can become delirious by which point the confusion may make it rather difficult to get treatment. I had a delirious fever from the 2009 swine flu, the fever lasted 3 days and the delirious stage only about 3 hours. It was pretty rapid onset and I couldn’t stand up let alone walk so by the time I noticed it I was unable to seek help. I figured the die had been cast and I’ll see how it turns out. Clearly it turned out ok but there is an inherent selection criteria bias in my post.

My hypothesis for COVID, that I don’t have good data for, was that it has an unusual immune system reaction profile with the long fuse being an under reaction followed by an overreaction and this overreaction could result in particularly damaging spiking high fevers. As someone with a preexisting auto immune condition the overreaction in particular worried me. I was worried that the use of fever suppressants early on in that process might exasperate the effect. I planned ahead of time to ride out the fever and was doing research into changes in mortality rates for Covid based on fever suppressants and I couldn’t find good data and was surprised by the lack of research to what seemed to me to be an obvious and extremely important question. Not having a good answer, especially for the Covid specific case, I decided to risk it.

When I did get Covid, post vaccine, it was a very rapid onset with a spiking fever of 106f (41c) which I knew was dangerous but again by the time that happened I couldn’t seek help. Thankfully that only lasted for about an hour and by the end of the day the Covid was basically gone.

I think in general I will try to ride out flus without fever suppressants and my N of 1 experiment seems to suggest that works. But agains selection criteria bias on that one. I really wish proper research gets done on this but I guess there isn’t much money in it.

Should have clarified the last sentence. If things get worse or any new symptoms come up within that 3 days start something or see a doc

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