How long before seeing a doc about a sore throat ?
Bad cold started 14 days ago and throat hurt pretty bad 3 days in.
Cold symptoms gone now but throat still sore, so that's 11 days of soreness total.
I had strep a couple months ago but looked and there are no white dots or anything .
I guess I should go in right ? It's persistent. Manageable with an aleve and spray but doesn't seem to be improving. What could it be?
Re: How long before seeing a doc about a sore throat ?
This past year has had a lot of my friends, family, and myself coming down with strangely persistent colds that have really painful swallowing glass type of sore throats.
What I have found, after being sick with this for two weeks, and trying ALL sorts of things (and often times things would work for certain symptoms like earache, nose drip, and cough but never work for the dang sore throat!) is to go to the drugstore and grab a bottle of L-Lysine. It's an amino acid that (I believe) your body cannot make but you get in your diet. Or perhaps your body does make it, I don't recall. Anyway, it's awesome because a) it's cheap at only $6-12 a bottle. b) it supposedly interrupts one of the life cycles of viral replication, so it takes a little while to work, but taken consistently it throws a monkey wrench in the viruses replicating and so it does die off. and when I say it takes a little while to work, I mean hours to days, not weeks to months.
Now, if you're REALLY sick, like go to the doctor and pay bunches of money sick, here is what I did for myself (on the cusp of going to a doctor after spending two weeks doing natural remedy after natural remedy and not having anything touch the sore throat symptom):
Take a gram of lysine once an hour for five straight hours. WITH the lysine, take a gram of aspirin to thin the blood so your blood gets as saturated as possible with lysine. It will still work without the aspirin, but this was my first experience with lysine. By the third hour, I could swallow without grimacing. By the fifth hour, I could just feel that something was a little off with my throat, but there wasn't any pain. But, by the fifth hour, I did have a whooshing feeling in my head that I attributed to thin blood. I did this right before bed. Then I took lysine several times over the next few days. I would say take 3-5 grams a day over maybe five days.
If you're also susceptible to colds, or say for example that you have herpes or any other virus, you can take lysine long term. I would say a gram twice a day would be enough of a maintenance dose. Maybe less.
As always, do your own research. And, unfortunately, if you're sick for awhile before doing this, your body is going to be weak for awhile-- so you may not have the painful symptoms but your body, in all likelihood is going to feel so effing sluggish that you're still going to need to baby yourself for awhile.
But-- at least you should start to see yourself getting better little by little. Being sick longer than a few days is so dispiriting. But you also have to give yourself time to recover and not rush it too bad or get too frustrated.
I hope that helps you.
Re: How long before seeing a doc about a sore throat ?
I've never had a sore throat for more than a week tops. Usually it's the first symptom that shows, and the first to go.
If it's been two weeks, I would be getting it checked out by a doctor. Unless you have medical experience, you won't be able to pin point exactly what the problem is. While Lysine could work, I think it's best to speak with a doc before taking any medicine you haven't taken before.
http://www.umm.edu/altmed/articles/lysine-000312.htm
Re: How long before seeing a doc about a sore throat ?
If it's been more than a week, it's time to see a doctor.
Re: How long before seeing a doc about a sore throat ?
I've never gone to the doctor with a cold, as the ones that persist tend to be my own fault (mostly because I just wasn't giving myself time to properly recuperate due to school, work, or trying to have a social life) so I know I just have to ride it out. But, with the cold symptoms gone and the soreness remaining, I would personally pay a trip to the doctor to see what's up.