With my sniffles continuing, I headed online for cutting-edge curative ideas, and stumbled upon the suggestion for a useful piece of medical equipment: a hair dryer.

Apparently, at least two doctors claim that blowing the dryer up your nose for three to five minutes at a stretch, a few times a day, works wonders.

To me, the science seems compelling. Rhinovirus grows best at temperatures around 91 degrees, and dies above 105. So, significantly raising the temperature of your sinuses and nasal passages for a few minutes should kill much of the virus, and reduce the ability of the rest to reproduce. Plus, warm air dries everything out, temporarily shrinking tissue and relieving sinus pressure. Finally, heat interrupts the histamine reaction, preventing swelling and sensitivity to other allergens.

All of which, as I said, seems to make sense. The problem being that blowing a dryer up your face causes you to turn bright red, which in turn causes your girlfriend to collapse on the floor, hysterically laughing at the impractical stupidity of this whole idea, which prevents you from doing it more than once.

Still, the empiricist in me kind of wants to try again. Any smarter folk than I with some anecdotal evidence or scientific rationale care to spur me on?