5 interesting health myths

There are hundreds of health-related myths flying around. Here are a few that I thought were interesting, and the truth about them.

1. Acne is caused by washing incorrectly
Truth: "Acne is caused by the effects of hormones on sebaceous glands. This is why it particularly affects teenagers and can also be increased by stress. Cleaning your face too often can actually increase acne as the body compensates to replace the body oil washed away." -UK Daily Mail

2. Underwire bras can cause breast cancer
Truth: "Rumor has it that underwire bras cause cancer, due to the way they allegedyl compress the lymphatic system under the arms and breasts, supposedly causing a buildup of toxins...It’s true that women who are obese have a slightly higher risk of getting BC. And perhaps obese women with big boobs are more likely to wear bras than women with flat chests—voilà, an urban myth was born. “But wearing a regular or underwire bra during the day or night, or just wearing tight clothing, does not affect breast-cancer risk,” says Marisa C. Weiss, MD, director of breast radiation oncology at Lankenau Hospital in Wynnewood, Pa." =Health.com

3. Cracking your knuckles will cause arthritis
Truth: "Depending on your point of view, knuckle-popping sounds disgusting or cool. There is no evidence that cracking your knuckles inflames the joints and leads to arthritis. The cracking causes the bones to pull apart, forming a gas bubble and breaking the adhesive seal in the joint. Crack! About a quarter of the people in the U.S. crack their knuckles and might begin to lose their grip a little. Constant cracking can weaken the fingers." -Medicinenet.com

4. Eating turkey makes you sleepy
Believed to be true for ages, research has found that the suspected tryptophan overload from turkey actually pales in comparison to the tryptophan found in Swiss cheese and pork. In fact, chicken and ground beef each contain about the same amount per ounce as our favorite Thanksgiving Day bird. In reality, it’s just the effects of eating a large meal that slows down blood flow and oxygenation to the brain." - Healthbolt.net

5. You're supposed to drink 8 glasses of water per day
Truth: "In 1945, the U.S. Food and Nutrition Board told people to consume eight glasses of fluid daily. Before long, most of us believed we needed eight glasses of water, in addition to what we eat and drink, every day. Water's great, but you also wet your whistle with juice, tea, milk, fruits and vegetables — quite enough to keep you hydrated. Even coffee quenches thirst, despite its reputation as a diuretic; the caffeine makes you lose some liquid, but you're still getting plenty." - The Today Show

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-363152/Top-10-health-myths-exposed.html
http://pokedandprodded.health.com/2008/07/16/breast-cancer-scares/?pkw=PSHEGLIM080708CNND1660&partner=yes
http://www.healthbolt.net/2008/01/24/7-health-myths-debunked/
http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=46642
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/23957401/

This is unacceptable.

So I was going to talk about Thanksgiving foods this week, but I had to forgo that plan in favor of something much more pressing, in my opinion: bathroom hygiene.

I'm running an article about this in December's issue of Unwind, but as a public service announcement to the girls side of Hagerstown Hall floor 5, I need to remind you ladies of the 10 things you should do when it comes to bathroom cleanliness and courtesy.

1. Please clean the hair out of the shower when you are done using it.
1a. Please throw away your used tampons if you take them out in the shower, do not leave them on the soap dish.

2. Someone on my hall must shed like a yeti, because the drain cups in the sinks are ALWAYS clogged with hair. Don't do whatever you're doing over the sink that causes this.
2a. Trashcans are for food, sink drains are NOT. The last thing I want to see when I'm brushing my teeth is little pieces of chicken or bloated spaghetti-o's chillin' two feet from my face. This rule also applies to hair ties, rubber bands, bobby pins and pieces of plastic.

3. Vomit in the toilet. Not in the shower, in the sink or on the floor.
3a. Flush.
3b. If you enter a stall and see that rule 3a has not been observed, either flush it first or move to another stall. Do not vomit on their vomit. There is a trash bag on one of our toilets because so many people vomited in it this weekend that it is now clogged.
3c. If you plan on drinking, which introduces the possibility of vomiting, do not order from Shanghai Cafe.
3d. For your own personal benefit, if you vomit and are clutching the sides of the toilet, wash your hands before you leave. In my opinion, this is worse than not washing your hands after using the bathroom normally.

4. If you feel the need to trim your square-down-there on the toilet, please make sure that all the clippings make it down the pipes. Do not try to cultivate a fur-lawn on the toilet seat.

5. This isn't necessarily a health issue, but if you use the bathtub shower, TURN OFF THE WATER ALL THE WAY. This is INCREDIBLY wasteful.

6. Towels hang to the right, don't hog the towel hooks so that the person on the end has nowhere to put their stuff. If you don't like the hook on the wall next to the first shower stall, use the second stall.

7. Spitting in the shower is sometimes necessary, but always unpleasant to hear if I'm trapped in the shower stall next to you.

8. When using the sanitary trashcans in the toilet stalls: deal discreetly with your period issues. Enough said.

9. For your own sake, wear shoes or slippers into the bathroom, not just socks. Surprisingly, lots of people miss when hovering.

10. Finally, if you do something in our bathroom that you would clean up in your bathroom at home, then take care of it. The cleaning staff dislikes us for a reason.

For the sake of us all, I beg you, follow these rules. It's not that much to ask, and it will make us all happier and healthier. I may have to live in a matchbox during the schoolyear, but I shouldn't have to bathe in a pigsty.

Thank you.

physician-assisted suicide?

So I had a pretty interesting discussion in my The Body and Literature Honors seminar today about physician-assisted suicide. According to the New York Times, Washington state joined Oregon after Tuesday's election as the second state to allow physicians to administer lethal injections to terminally ill men and women who are ready to die.

I'm sure you remember the Terri Schiavo case...it was a huge issue and very heavily publicized when her husband was finally able to pull the plug. The Washington state proposition barely passed, just 51 to 49, which shows that the nation continues to be divided. There are several safeguards in the proposition to prevent people from rushing into the decision, according to nytimes.com.

"Patients requesting this assistance must be mentally competent, residents of the state, have six months or less to live according to two physicians, wait 15 days after their initial request and then repeat that request both orally and in writing. They must be capable of administering the lethal medication themselves and agree to counseling if their physicians request it. In addition, these patients also must be informed by their health care providers of other feasible alternatives."

The Times article also talked about reasons why assisted suicide is technically already happening. It's rare, but some patients who are suffering from intractable pain receive treatments so intense that they actually hasten death. Also, we tend not to question "a
patient’s right to forgo life-sustaining therapies or discontinue them once begun."

This includes not only feeding tubes and ventilators, but also chemotherapy, insulin or antibiotics.

And as my seminar teacher Sibbie reminds us, we all have a right to control what is done or not done to our own bodies.

But what if we are not conscious to make that choice?

The Washington Post ran an article today about a 12-year-old Jewish boy on life support at a D.C. hospital, who is brain-dead and technically deceased, that doctors want to take off life support. His parents are fighting vehemently to keep him on it, because they say that "their faith does not define death as cessation of brain function alone." Basically, his heart and lungs are still functioning thanks to a ventilator and various other machines, but he is brain is 100 percent dead in both higher and lower functioning, so if there was not a machine there to pump the heart and expand the lungs, his body would be in the morgue by now.

It's a Maryland law that physicians have the right to declare a body dead if it has no brain activity, which they did on Tuesday for this boy. According to the Post, "In filings, the hospital extended its sympathy to the family but said the boy should no longer be on its equipment, saying that "scarce resources are being used for the preservation of a deceased body.""

So who's correct? There are many reasons that make both situations problematic, but I tend to agree with the doctors in both cases. I'm not talking about Dr. Kevorkian or anything like that - but if someone is in so much pain that they are willing to end their own life, chances are they will find a way to do it somehow on their own. Other than that, I'm not going to touch that topic.

But as for the brain-dead child, he's been in a vegetative state for a long time, and once he is brain-dead he's not coming back. There is no functioning, the nerve cells have died, and nerve cells in the brain do not regenerate. A beating heart and moving lungs are literally the highest functioning his body will ever be able to perform again, and that is only because they are being forced to do so by machines. Honestly, at this point it seems to be selfishness and grief on the part of the parents that is keeping him alive, more than Jewish law. If they want their son to move on if he hasn't already, the compassionate thing to do would be to accept his death and stop trying to force life into a dead body. The hospital is right; the machines being used to keep him alive could be serving...not a better purpose, I suppose, but a more pressing one.

Of course, I can say this stuff all I want, but I can never imagine the amount of suffering these parents must feel at the loss of such a young son to a debilitating brain tumor. Their attorneys are also right in that the grief of the parents and their religious beliefs should be respected. But for how long? He is never going to come back, and he can't be kept on life support indefinitely. Eventually his organs will not function as well, and his body will deteriorate from lack of nutrition and exercise, and his body will die like all bodies. How long can a body without a functioning brain be kept a live?

Sadly, however long his parents fight to keep him on life support, it's not a matter of if he will be taken off, it's a matter of when, because one way or another, his body is going to die. But this situation does raise an important question: If we can control it, when should we let go of life?


The Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/05/AR2008110504602.html

The New York Times: http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/at-the-end-of-life-a-delicate-calculus/

Go longer by going without: the art of fasting

If there's one healthy practice that came out of organized religion, surprise! It's fasting.

Yep, today my psychobiology professor told the class that fasting twice a year was one of the most healthy things you could do for your body. In fact, he said, people who fast twice per year live significantly longer than those who don't.

Let's not confuse this with some kind of eating disorder or crazy 5-day juice only power diet. My professor doesn't want people to stop eating for more than a day two or three times a year.

Apparently, during fasting, the body's energy is diverted away from the digestive system (because there's nothing going on there, obviously) to regulating the metabolism and beefing up the immune system. Also, slower protein synthesis during fasting means higher efficiency, and therefor healthier cells, ergo healthier tissues and organs.

If you've ever had the flu, you know that any kind of food while your that sick is completely unappealing. That's because when your body is sick, it automatically kicks into fasting-mode to flush out your system and focus all your body's energy on knocking out the virus.

It makes sense, then, that periodic fasting over the years will increase your body's overall health and also your life expectancy. However, be careful about fasting; don't just randomly decide that you're going to stop eating for X amount of days. Personally, I think I'm going to start celebrating Yom Kippur with my Jewish friends - at least in the not eating for 25 hours sense.

Breast and Jerry's?

Hello everyone! This is the first blog post for Unwind! Magazine’s Health blog. I’m Sophie and I’m the Health section editor. I’m hoping that this blog will be entertaining and somewhat educational; I plan on writing about current health news, College Park health issues, or anything health-related I may happen upon that I find interesting.

One of these topics is the recent proposition Peta has made to Ben & Jerry’s to use human breast milk in place of cow’s milk in their ice cream. Peta’s reasoning, according to a recent article in the UK’s The Examiner is that cow’s milk has been linked to "juvenile diabetes, allergies, constipation, obesity, and prostate and ovarian cancer."

Really Peta? Doesn’t it seem like there might be a reason humans stop drinking their mother’s milk as toddlers? If adults consumed human breast milk on a regular basis they would get sick, because the nutrients in breast milk are meant for growing infants.

However, there are a few cancer patients in the U.S. who use breast milk as an immune-booster, according to BBC News. Cancer experts, of course, say that there is no evidence to say that breast milk helps fight off cancer, and that in fact drinking breast milk "might be risky for patients…because drugs and viruses can be transmitted through breast milk." Also, said patients do admit that breast milk has an unpleasant, "oily" after-taste.

In response to Peta, Dairy Council director said that "Dairy foods have been in the diet for thousands of years."

Clearly Peta’s warnings that cow’s milk puts our health in imminent danger should not be taken to heart. Besides, although we may feel comfortable eating weird Ben & Jerry’s flavors like Phish Food, I don’t know how comfortable we would be eating Rackberry or Coffee D-Cup Crunch. And on that note, good luck finding enough breast milk donations to keep the brothers in business.

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