"Medicine" vs rest

Being jet lagged sucks. Being jet lagged and sick is miserable. I woke up at 4am today and I’m feeling a lot better than yesterday, but I’m ready to start feeling good again so I can enjoy my Amsterdam trip and have my wits back.

I’ve been fortunate in my past travels to Europe and never been sick. Well one difference in being sick in the Netherlands (and most of Europe)? There is no cold or flu medicine. You can’t just walk to a Walgreens or CVS and buy DayQuil or Mucinex.

It turns out that if you even go to a doctor here, they won’t prescribe you any such medicine either. Instead they’ll prescribe a game-changing European medicine called fluids and rest.

On the surface you might just chalk it up to European ways, but it gets a bit more interesting once you start digging into the “why”.

The easy and widely used explanation is that “medicine” like DayQuil doesn’t help you recover any faster which makes sense. The active ingredients in OTC cold medicine is usually a mix of pain relievers and things that help alleviate your congestion. There’s actually no healing properties in this drugs.

This all makes sense to me, but heck if I’m going to be sick and miserable for 7 days, why not make it better with some drugs? Well I think this has to do a bit more with cultural differences.

Truth be told, being sick and resting at home is not all that bad. You rest, catch up on reading or TV, and heal as you should. Unfortunately this isn’t the way Americans operate.

Americans, like myself, always have an on motor. When I start to get a cold, I go to the drug store and load up on DayQuil to get me through the workday. As I right this with cold, I am preparing to go into the office later today.

Europeans on the other hand take being ill very seriously. My European colleagues take more sick days than we do in the SF office. They don’t get sick more than we do, it’s just much more culturally appropriate to be out multiple days from work.

This is an American culture problem. We fear being left behind in work, social, etc. and experience a fomo so we power through with the help of strong drugs. I myself am very guilty these last few days.

As we build our company culture, we need to encourage sick days for people to get well. Happy and healthy employees make the best employees. I plan on taking these lessons learned and even encouraging people to take days off. I could use some days off myself to recover.