Top Seven Health Myths even Doctors Believe

By Anastacia Mott Austin

Repeat something often enough and soon it will seem to be true. So appears to be the case with many commonly held medical factoids that turned out to be false, according to researchers who released a study this week in the British Medical Journal.

Dr. Rachel Vreeman and Dr. Aaron Carroll, professors at the Indiana University School of Medicine were curious about facts they’d heard repeated by physicians to their patients, and wondered how many of them were actually myths.

They narrowed an extensive list down to seven medical "facts" which proved to have no basis in science, and did research on each one:

1. You need to drink eight glasses of water daily. This recommendation apparently has no basis in scientific fact. A 1945 article made the statement that people should drink, on average, one milliliter of fluid for every calorie consumed. But the researchers found evidence that even if this were true, most of those fluid milliliters are consumed within food, or in other liquids, including milk, coffee, tea, etc.

2. People only use about 10% of their brains. The researchers could find no evidence supporting this claim, and numerous reports refuting it. Multiple studies have shown that at any given time, no one part of the brain is completely dormant. Sources attributing the claim to Albert Einstein could not be located.

3. Fingernails and hair keep growing after death. This creepy factoid has fascinated many a childhood campfire gathering, but is in fact not true. Growth of any bodily tissue requires an active process that simply cannot be carried out once an organism is no longer alive. The authors of the study quote forensic anthropologist William Maples: "It is a powerful, disturbing image, but it is pure moonshine. No such thing occurs."

4. Once you start shaving, hair only grows back thicker and darker. Apparently hogwash. It only looks thicker because the finer, tapered end of the hair has been removed, and newly emerging hair has not been exposed to sunlight and is therefore darker.

5. Reading in dim light will wreck your eyes. Never mind what your mother told you, this just isn’t true, say the study doctors. Your eyes might feel temporarily dry and achy, but these effects stop once you stop reading in the dim light, and have no lasting effects.

6. Eating turkey will make you sleepy. While turkey does contain trace amounts of tryptophan, the "sleepy" amino acid, it doesn’t have any more than most other similar foods, such as beef or chicken. Post-Thanksgiving napfests can be blamed instead on the fact that you simply overstuffed yourself and all the energy in your body has gone to try to digest the feast.

7. Cell phones will interfere with medical equipment at hospitals. While some studies showed a small percentage (4% or fewer) of incidents involving mobile phones interfering with medical equipment, most of those cases were when the phone was within one meter of the equipment. No serious malfunctions causing any kind of injury or death have ever been reported.

The researchers concluded their report by saying that they embarked on their study not to embarrass their fellow physicians, but to remind them all that they would be smart to always be on their toes and make sure that the information passed on to patients has a legitimate basis in fact.

The study’s authors add that most people see their doctors as figures of authority, and that the research can help patients to be aware that even their doctors might sometimes not have all of the necessary information at hand.

In other words, it never hurts to ask questions or to do a little fact-checking for yourself.

Now, if only someone will do a study proving that green beans are actually not good for you…