I'll try anything
The Chinese have a reliable cure for the cold and it costs less than $2 for a little bottle of pills. Called Gan Mao Ling, containing only a combination of herbs of some sort, it never let me down, cured every cold overnight. I did start taking the pills on the day I was coming down fast with a cold, don't know how they would work with an "old" cold.
Everyone in my large office used the things, which we could pick up at any Chinese grocery store.
a soup spoon works just a well.
Much easier to get an over-the-counter spray-up-the-nose bottle (not the squirt kind, but the good measured-pump spray kind, like NasalCrom and some other products come in), and a bottle of saline solution for contact lenses, with which to fill and refill the little spray bottle repeatedly. About 6 squirts up each nostril, with a good inward sniff with each squirt, then lean forwards and sideways to slosh it around, and finish off with a good blow into a Kleenex. Takes about 30 seconds total, and consts virtually nothing (the saline solution is about $3 for a 12 oz. bottle). I do it every morning of the year without fail, and no longer get colds or bronchitis.