Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hello, I am a senior in high school and I am trying to find a way to conduct my experiment. I want to test whether at home remedies or over the counter medications are more successful. I was wondering if there was a bacteria I could potentially test that was a common cause of a sickness, such as the common cold, that I would be able to conduct my experiment on. Ideally I would test a bacteria that causes very common illnesses, but I am unaware of how I could test this experiment. Thank you for your time.

Hello and welcome to Science Buddies,
You have certainly chosen a challenging issue! "Curing" the common cold is one of medicine's unsolved problems. So you might consider whether this ambitious project is practical for a 12th grade science project.

You don't mention how you would conduct your experiment, but if you were thinking of having humans participate, you should look at this Science Buddies' article:

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... mittee-src

Science Buddies has over 1200 science projects which you could browse to see if you could adapt one or more projects to a science project that you find challenging and that is feasible with your resources:

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... e-projects

You can use the Topic selection wizard or browse by topics or search with your choice of keywords. The projects are labeled by how long it might take to complete it and the grade level.

I hope this helps and let us know what you find and if you have more questions!