Clogged up nose, hurting throat, feeling crappy

The best remedies I has always found are the simplest ones.

A warm salt water gargle for your throat every 2-3 hours. Sip on REAL honey and lemon juice

A shower as hot as you can handle and inhaling the steam through your nose.

Drink heaps of water, like a full glass every hour or so. Take some paracetamol if you have to.

Start simple because most cold and flu medicines contain Psuedoephedrine that will make you feel worse and can mess up your sleep patterns, and sleep is the most important thing when you don't feel well.

The second most important thing, a positive attitude, don't let feeling like crap get you down.

 

If it's allergies they'll be gone soon if you remove yourself from pollen contaminated areas, however, supposing it isn't allergies -

As mentioned above, do salt washes. Simple mix salt into water and gargle every few hours. It causes the area to become dry and heal better. Warm, moist places are the most suitable areas for bacteria to thrive in.

If you have a hand mirror, make the "ahhhh" sounds the doctors ask you to make and look at the back of your throat, see if it looks inflamed at all. Do this daily to see if it looks better/worse. If at any point you see white spots, then generally it's going to be bacterial, and needs antibiotics.

Last point I'll make, is that if you have a headache too, in my experience it usually doesn't require a doctors trip, as if it's bacterial then it'll usually be confined to one particular area, there's only a few dangerous illnesses that affect the throat, nose and come with a headache. On the other hand, strep throat which is pretty common, can end up causing very harmful things such as major sepsis, meningitis and pneumonia. However, it will only get that damaging if you don't get antibiotics for it, and you'd know if you had strep throat as your throat would be very painful/sore and it would be heavily inflamed/red.

For the nose: anything with menthol will help. HOWEVER - menthol doesn't actually unblock the nose/sinus. It just makes you feel very decongested. This is useful however as it stops you struggling to breathe through your nose, makes you feel much less bunged up and stops that choking feeling with mucus. A lot of chewing gums contain menthol.

Get better soon!

 

Actually the purpose of salt is that it has awesome anti-bacterial and antiseptic properties, the same with Lemon while the Honey also has antibacterial properties as well as an awesome soothing agent.

You're both too young for Rum, but that will make you feel awesome too...LOL

 

You're right, I wrote that at a very late time where I was so was very tired. Completely forgot that it kills bacteria via osmosis.

Haha, it might make you feel good temporarily, but unless you drink pints of water before sleeping you'll want to kill yourself in the morning when you have a sore and very dehydrated throat

 

From the land down under, the best hang over cure is a glass of water and Vegemite on toast

 

Try drinking tea - the water vapor will help, and a nice warm cup of tea can be pretty comforting as well.