Don't Cross Your Eyes...They'll Get Stuck That Way!: And 75 Other Health Myths Debunked
Read Don't Cross Your Eyes...They'll Get Stuck That Way!: And 75 Other Health Myths Debunked Online
Authors: Aaron E. Carroll
FOR
Jacob, Noah, and Sydney,
who still think the myths I make up are true
AND
Tom and Jacki Vreeman,
who told me far fewer crazy things than most parents
Contents
Also by Dr. Aaron E. Carroll and Dr. Rachel C. Vreeman
Introduction
“Don’t cross your eyes … they’ll get stuck that way!” Did your mother scold you every time you made a crazy face at your brother? In our houses, it was even worse if she caught you sitting too close to the television or she had just caught you reading in the dark. We bet that you still occasionally wonder whether you would need your glasses if you had listened to her.
Your mother had some strong ideas about what would keep you healthy. Use soap! Stay away from that sick person! Don’t shake hands! Don’t touch the toilet! Her rules for taking care of your body went on and on. Without even realizing it, many of us follow all kinds of rules for keeping our bodies healthy. We worry about how public bathrooms and airplanes might make us sick. We try to stay away from eggs and carbonated drinks. We drink warm milk when we cannot sleep. We tell our own children not to sit too close to the television. We even secretly think that handling a toad might give us warts.
Every day, one hears or reads more ideas about how to care for our bodies. We use hydrogen peroxide to clean out our wounds and vitamin E to heal them faster. We eat oysters to get in the mood. We stretch before running to prevent an injury. Have you ever sniffled or coughed in the wrong company? Vitamin C, echinacea, zinc, and neti pots will immediately be foisted upon you as surefire cures for your cold. As we hear more and more information about our bodies, the list of things to be worried about only grows. You better not eat eggs or hot peppers or sugar or chocolate or fish. Caffeine will stunt your growth. Hair dye will hurt your unborn baby. Cell phones and deodorant might give you cancer. Even worse, the list of things you are supposed to avoid seems to change every day.
Sometimes, though, we worry about the wrong things. We worry about wet hair and accidentally touching a toilet when we should be much more worried about smoking or not exercising regularly. But it is easy to worry about the wrong things when we hear them all the time. Your grandmother, your favorite magazine, and even your doctor all may have told you that eggs will give you high cholesterol or that hot peppers will give you an ulcer. If your snot turns green, everyone will want you to run to the doctor for an antibiotic.
We hope this book provides an antidote to many of your worries.
Don’t Cross Your Eyes
outlines why many of the things you heard from your grandmother or your favorite magazine or even your doctor are actually medical myths.
This book is meant to get you to ask questions. What will really make me sick? How does my body really work? What things actually work to keep my body healthy? We don’t want to get you in trouble with your mother, but we do want to get you thinking about the truth behind all those crazy things you hear about your body and health. We want you to ask “why?”
Many of the things you hear about your body are just not true. They are myths. Some of the ideas are simply unproven, while others have been studied scientifically and proven false. We think that it is silly to waste time, energy, and money worrying about things that will not hurt you. It is just as silly to follow advice that is not going to help you.
As physicians, we want you to be healthy, and we certainly do not want you to get sick. But because we are also researchers, we want you to know the truth about your body. We want our advice to be based on science. If there is good science telling us what will or will not make your body healthy, we think that you should pay attention to it. In our first book,
Don’t Swallow Your Gum! Myths, Half-Truths, and Outright Lies About Your Body and Health
, we discussed dozens of myths about how your body works. In this book, we are going to examine many more of them. We are not just going to be “experts” telling you what will or will not work to keep you healthy. We are going to explore the science behind various ideas about your health, and we will let the science tell you what you can stop worrying about.
Even though we are doctors (and true geeks) who get excited about research studies and scientific experiments, we know that not everyone feels that way. (Aaron just shed a sad geek tear thinking about people who don’t like science.) Nonetheless, this book—about all the crazy things your mother said about your body—is secretly a science book. We researched each of the ideas in depth, combing the medical and scientific literature for any studies that have been done to tell us the truth about these medical beliefs. Then we try to describe the research in a way that allows you to understand what it says.
Remember, we want you to ask “why?” We don’t want you to believe something is a myth just because
we
said so. We want you to understand
why
we said so. That is why we will talk about the research behind each belief and whether good studies give us an answer. Most of the beliefs we examine in this list from A to Z end up being completely false. They are myths or outright lies! Others have some element of the truth. Just a few actually turn out to be true. Whatever the case, we want you to know whether the science comes out in favor or against the belief, and just how convincing the case may be. In the back of the book, you can find a big list of the references for what we say about each myth. We are always scouring the databases for new studies that add more information, and if new studies come out that prove an idea is or is not true, we are happy to change our minds based on that research.
Before you start reading, we offer two words of caution. First of all, some readers of
Don’t Swallow Your Gum!
told us that the book turned them into the know-it-all at the dinner table or at the party. We love being right, but we also know that people can get annoyed when you are always Ms. or Mr. Smarty-pants. Use discretion. Second, it is always a good idea to show respect for your mother. Even if she is wrong.
Happy myth-busting!
Acupuncture
You know what’ll really get rid of that cold?… Acupuncture
No one likes having a cold. Whether you hate the cough and sore throat the most, or whether it is the sniffling and congestion that wears you out, you want that cold to be finished as soon as possible. Here in the United States, you may be more likely to try vitamin C or echinacea, but in other parts of the world, such as in Japan and China, acupuncture is a more common alternative therapy for cold relief.
In careful studies, acupuncture has been shown to work for a number of medical problems. It can be an effective way to treat the nausea that many people feel after they have surgery and anesthesia. It can cut down on the vomiting that cancer patients experience when they are getting chemotherapy. It can help with some kinds of pain, including childbirth, pain from shoulder or neck injuries, and chronic back pain. But acupuncture does not work for every problem. In studies where acupuncture was used to treat cocaine addiction, depression, insomnia, or irritable bowel syndrome, it did not help patients.
Few cold remedies actually work, so it is not surprising people would want to give acupuncture a whirl. Unfortunately, there is very little evidence that acupuncture works to prevent or treat colds. In the medical literature, most of the studies using acupuncture in this way come from Japan. Two of them examined whether acupuncture could prevent people from catching colds. Both of these “studies” showed that acupuncture was useful for preventing colds, but we put the word “studies” in quotation marks for a good reason: they were only case reports of people who had used acupuncture frequently and seemed to have fewer colds. In fact, the two reports only looked at three people. The experiences of three people are not enough to decide whether a cold prevention method works and should not be counted as actual research.
A final study from Japan looked at whether the students and staff in five Japanese acupuncture schools had any fewer colds or any fewer cold symptoms if they received acupuncture. This study included more people (326). Although those receiving acupuncture did report fewer cold symptoms in an overall questionnaire, there was no difference in how many days the participants were reporting cold symptoms in daily diary records.
There were several other problems with this study. First, the most accurate measure of whether the people in the study were having cold symptoms did not show any improvement with acupuncture. The participants only thought there was a difference when they were asked about the overall picture. This might be explained in part by another problem with the methodology: there was no fake acupuncture, or placebo, used for the group that did not get acupuncture for cold symptoms. The people who had acupuncture knew that they had had acupuncture, and so it is possible that they remembered differently because they thought the acupuncture had made things better. The study was also flawed because there were significant differences in the groups being studied even before the study began.
There is no good evidence to suggest that acupuncture will stop you from catching a cold or that it will make your cold symptoms any better. While acupuncture could be studied more carefully for coughs and colds, as it has been for other health problems, there is no convincing reason to believe (yet) that acupuncture is just the thing for your cold.
ADHD
ADHD medication will stunt your child’s growth
More than four million children in the United States have been diagnosed with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). For children with ADHD, particular types of stimulant medications have been proven to be effective therapies in managing their symptoms. While many parents and doctors appreciate how these medicines help children overcome the hyperactivity, distractibility, or inattention that come with ADHD, they worry about how the medicines for ADHD might also be harmful. In particular, many parents and doctors alike have heard that ADHD medicines stunt children’s growth. Parents rightfully wonder whether the benefits outweigh the risks.