Thanks for the idea, I'll give that a try next time things get that far. lets hope no time soon...

sounds like good advice. I think I'm over the hump this time, I still have a stuffy nose but I think I've beaten it this time around.

. I also stay clear of decongestants, they seem to dry my nose out. This will only keep things there longer since dry mucous is sticky mucous.

In my case my sinuses have very narrow passages in them. From what I can tell, decongestants thin the mucus, and helps it drain out of my sinuses easier. Without them, my entire nasal passage gets clogged up like glue and my final misery usually winds me up breathing through my mouth exclusively. Though I don't know how much of that is clogging with mucus and how much is from my sinuses swelling. I've even been able to get some relief in the past by managing to get straws up into my nostrils so I could breathe through my nose when trying to sleep. The swelling blocks my nose mainly near the nostrils.

I DO run a pair of holmes 3500 humidifiers here to keep the humidity between 30-50%. It fluctuates quite a bit during the winter days because of the cycle of furnace activity between daytime and nighttime. I got the second unit so it'd catch up faster in the morning after the heat kicked on. I do keep my furnace filter changed regularly but don't use any of the expensive filters.

No I don't rinse my nostrils.

My sinus problems aren't allergy-based. They just plain have issues. Not sure exactly what. I've heard horror stories of what my mom went through when she was younger, she had cases of having to pull dried mucus out of her nostrils in strips. Glad mine's not that bad. I think I just have issues with my sinuses being a little more restrictive than usual, plus they are prone to swelling up if irritated, closing my sinus passages, creating a sealed environment for bacteria to grow in.

Your kidding right? you drink Pepsi to help? Who's the quack...

You obviously have little or no experience with sinus infections. I've got lots. The sinuses drain almost nonstop (day and night) down the back of the throat. Before the infection really sets in, the sinus draining produces a yellow (basically snot/phlegm) slick down the back of the throat that is irritating but tolerable.

When the sinus infection gets going, this yellow slick turns green and now the back of your throat has a bacteria-compress on it continuously, and that leads quickly to a throat infection, which causes a hacking cough, the combination of which quickly tears up the throat. All of this means you cough continuously, have a really sore throat, and get zero sleep.

Pepsi isn't too far off from battery acid, but the stomach will tolerate it. It's capable of breaking down a lot of things, including the phlegm streak on the back of the throat produced by the draining sinuses. I knew it might be able to help, so this time around I gave it a go, and it's actually working a lot better than expected. I've been able to take more decongestants because I can keep my throat clear, and I hope that will flush out the brewing sinus infection before it gets out of control. Though I forgot to bring a stock of pepsi to work today, I'll be grabbing a large size mcd's here in a bit to continue to keep the phlegm washed out of the back of my throat.

The pepsi will become a lot more important if the infection gets worse, to keep my throat clear of infected phlegm. But I don't know if my body can eventually evict a full blown sinus infection without antibiotics, I've never really had an opportunity to hold out for more than a few days to find out.

The one they usually give me is Cephalexin

As of 2008, cefalexin was the most popular cephalosporin antibiotic in the United States, with more than 25 million prescriptions of its generic versions alone, for US$255 million in sales (though less popular than two other antibiotics, amoxicillin and azithromycin, each with 50 million prescriptions per year).

At least I'm not alone. Looks like it came out way back in 1967. I've always heard people complaining that if antibiotics were commonly used they'd become less effective over time. But this one's been around for a long time and is in widespread use... so doesn't seem to support their argument much, tho in theory it makes sense.

what kind of sinus infections are we talking about here? If it's the common cold, antibiotics won't do anything for you at all.

It's fairly obvious that these are bacterial infections, considering how effective the antibiotics always are for me.

They've swabbed the back of my throat a few times (pick up a bit of the yellow or green goo to check) but I don't recall them ever getting back to me as to what they found. They may have been checking to make sure it wasn't viral.

So why are the organic farmers not suing more often for pollution by Monsanto's seed?

They have good lawyers that can argue either side of the facts and win. It's hard to get them cornered in a case where they're caught trying to defend their argument and attack it at the same time.

When the farmer's field gets cross pollinated with monsanto GE, Monsanto says the farmer is responsible for the DNA in his field. (due to drift)

Then when the "all natural" farmers get pesticide drift or GE material showing up in their field, the big farms say they can't be responsible for drift from field to field.

See, they want it both ways. The problem is these are usually argued in separate cases, and the law is pushed in one direction or the other by sheer weight of lawyers, whichever is favorable for the big guy in the case, Until this basic question is solidly answered in a court with some weight to it, they'll continue to do this to the little farmers.

I inherited bad sinuses from my mother who occasionally gets wicked sinus infections and has to go on hardcore antibiotics, the kind that WIPE your digestive tract and turn your poo white.

Fortunately for me genetics diluted the problem and I don't get one more than once a year usually. I've tried to tough it out, load up on decongestants and expectorants (due to drainage) etc and all that happens is it gets my throat torn up like hamburger from the infected runoff combined with coughing. Lucky me, I'm going through my yearly round of that right now actually. I started myself on decongestants immediately and have been pounding down pepsi almost nonstop to try to keep my sinuses and throat clear, but it still looks like the throat version of red-eye in there. I might actually beat it without antibiotics for the first time this time since I've jumped on it so aggressively.

In the past it's usually been the same story. Try to use over-the-counter meds for a week, finally it is getting so bad that the yellow mucus overnight has my throat destroyed by morning. (which will improve somewhat during the day, but not enough, it's a losing battle day to night) Enough of those and I can't stop coughing and I sprint into the local "convenient care" before work and a random doc looks at me and prescribes a decongestant and expectorant (that cost 2x the OTC usually) saying he doesn't want to give me antibiotics YET. Thanks.

So I'm back in the office 3-4 day later, almost unable to talk, haven't slept in days, throat killing me, and throat is totally red with green mucus streaking down in the back. "Ooooh! you have a bad sinus infection now! Here's some antibiotics!" Thanks. Now why couldn't we have just done this three days ago instead of putting me through two days of hell?

So the last two times I went in I relayed the above story and they conceded maybe antibiotics before it gets REALLY bad is a good plan for me. And I was sooo thankful, instead of it taking several more days of winding down misery, another two weeks in all, one round of refills to clear up, it was much better the very next day and cleared up in 5 days, both times.

Whoever says antibiotics don't help sinus infections is a quack. I seriously wonder what would happen to people like me if there were no antibiotics, could it get bad enough to hospitalize or kill me?

It does not matter. You cannot patent life

Yes you can, in a limited way. You can patent genetic modifications. And that's what this is all about.

The problem here is that there's no foolproof way to prevent this variation of copyright infringement. (Monsanto is like the RIAA of the farm) And so they've bought the laws stacked heavily in their favor to make sure they can legally go after everyone they're entitled to, at a cost of being able to go after a lot of innocents as well. (one of my pet peeves, overly broad laws)

In this case the big issue is that if a farmer has a field near a Monsanto field, the wind WILL (not slim chance, not might, not maybe, WILL) cross-pollinate with some of the corn in his field. Then the goons can come in and find a kernel or two that contain DNA from their patented field, and by the law that makes you breaking the law and owing damagesa. So now the little farmer gets extorted out of his land. And that's just how the laws have been bought onto the books. It's not right, but that's the law now.

This isn't like music downloading where 95% is infringing and they're trying to hide under the "5% of it is lawful so you have to allow it" umbrella. There is a significant percentage of "unavoidable unintentional infringing" going on and companies like Monsanto abuse the law to their advantage as a result.

no, your employer is paying you to work for them. You are their bitch, you should know this as you agreed to it when you signed the contract that exchanged your time for their money. If you had any sense you'd have read it and had the bit that says "all work done during this employment" changed to "all work done during contracted hours" (or similar)

In most cases people are hired to perform specific tasks. They are not expected to perform tasks far outside the bounds of those things. If you're hired to be a programmer for an auto company, they expect you to write code for their cars or their business. If you come up with a good idea on how to manage antilock brakes, whether or not while on the clock, that idea is theirs. If you come up with an optimization on a mailserver while you're off the clock while you're at home, they might have claim to that, if part of your job involves maintenance of the servers while at work. If you think of a really good new recipe for your favorite lasagna one weekend, come on now... do you really expect that to be company property? (but see, if you blew an hour of their time during your day job thinking about it, instead of while off the clock, you've cheated them out of some of the time they pay you for)

You can't just simply say "anything you think of, on or off the clock, is mine". It will need to have some relevance to the job you were hired to do to hold water.

When you are hired by a company, they do not own your life. They own your services and the fruits of your services created during a fixed period of time during the week. They may also have claim to IP created off the clock that is directly related to the work you perform while on the clock, because you are benefitting from the time they paid you for while at work, where they were paying you to think about those things.

Simply because you "might have been thinking about that while you were at work yesterday" doesn't mean they own the idea. If you're being productive and focused at work you won't likely have much time to think about anything off task anyway. If you do waste company time thinking about unrelated things you are working on independently at home, (like spending an hour on the web researching different new spice ideas for your lasagna you're going to be making for dinner on Sunday) then you either have to look at it as the employer having a stake in your "project" at home, OR that you are cheating the company by misuse of on-the-clock time. Since the former is such a grey area and difficult to quantify, the latter is the one that should be enforced. In other words, if you're frequently daydreaming at work on design ideas for your new automatic porch painter while at work, they ought to replace you with someone with more focus that will have better productivity, instead of trying to claim some stake in your painting business you do on the weekend.