My wife and I drink a martini every afternoon for the same reason . . . haven't been sick once in the last 10 years! Don't argue with science.
Sometimes you need a little common sense and reasoning ability as well as listening to "authorities".
I remember my mother telling me how she was so anxious when we first moved here that she couldn't sleep. She asked her doctor if she could take some medication, and this was a woman who hated taking pills. He said to take a glass of wine instead.
Of course, I wasn't advising anyone to lock themselves in with a crate of vodka and drink themselves insensible.
That may be how some people would react, but not us.
As for salt water gargles, doctors also recommend that.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't be washing our hands and keeping the surfaces disinfected, also "old time" remedies, btw.
Oh, fwiw, my mother also told me that a sudden jolt of cold air could lead to illness. I pooh-pood her for YEARS, and never took any account of it. Within the last few years I've seen papers finding that a "sudden" decrease in temperature can lower the immune system a bit.
I've been an amateur cook and student of cooking for decades, and I've discovered that all of the rules which chefs (and fabulous home cooks like my mother) have devised for the optimum outcome actually have a lot of science, particularly chemistry, behind them.
The people who created those recipes didn't know that; they just knew, after hundreds and hundreds of years of trial and error, what "worked" and what didn't.
In the same way, people boiled willow bark because they had figured out it lowered fever. They didn't know that it contains the active ingredient in aspirin; they just knew it worked.
I suppose it's analogous to how people "invented" farming, or metallurgy, or the wheel.
Not saying this can't all go astray. The Chinese have long believed that a powder made out of dried pangolin "skin" is good for arthritis, among other things. Even if it's true, which I don't know one way or another, given how many diseases certain animals can harbor, including bats, who are also used for medications, it's not worth the risk.
I think I'm going to take that old GPs advice, and yours: 1 drink before bed.
Maybe I'll fall asleep easier too.