5 Ridiculous Medical Myths You Probably Believe

Of course, that's not even the scariest scenario. That would be the SBLD (silent but literally deadly) variety: a fart-based name we just made up to distract ourselves from the horrifying reality that there's such a thing as heart attacks with no symptoms. They're real, and even worse, fairly common -- studies show that anywhere from 40 to 60 percent of heart attacks go unnoticed. There's a distinct possibility that if you do have a heart attack, your first indication that anything's wrong could be when the white light blinks on at the end of the long dark hallway you were floating down.

Luckily, there are a lot of anti-cold immune boosters out there designed to prevent that exact scenario from happening. And they must work, because they pull in as much as $100 million a year.

The Reality

You know all those godawful symptoms you soldier through for a few weeks every year? Constricted nasal passages, sore throats and dalking thike dis? Every single one of those symptoms is caused by your immune system, and not the cold virus itself. In fact, the cold virus is actually mostly harmless, except for the fact that it causes your immune system to go bananas.

What we know as the cold is actually about 200 different viruses that your body has a tendency to overreact to. Your immune system's usually an OK judge of character, but when one of these viruses shows up, your body goes into riot mode. The symptoms we associate with the cold are just your immune system flailing at a tiny virus that wasn't going to hurt you either way. So taking an immune booster is just about the opposite of what you should do, since your immune system is causing the problem and not the virus itself.

If your immune system just ignored those viruses and let them take their best shot at you, you'd be fine. We know this because approximately a quarter of the population are effectively "immune" to the cold. They never catch colds because their bodies don't freak the hell out whenever one of those 200 viruses sneaks in. Instead of waging a snot-based war on the virus, they let it hang out, and for the most part they're generally no worse for wear.

Of course, neither are the people who do suffer from colds. Scientists examined the nasal cells of cold sufferers and found none of the damage you'd expect from a harmful viral infection. So essentially, even if you catch a cold, what you're experiencing is one long, miserable false alarm in which your body turns on the sprinklers and flushes everyone out of the building, just in case.

This is why cold and allergy symptoms are often hard to tell apart: They're both caused by an overactive immune system overreacting to something that's essentially harmless. So giving yourself immunity boosters is like trying to prevent a fistfight by pumping the unstable hothead full of steroids.

Unfortunately, avoiding immunity boosters is really the only thing that can save the people who are susceptible to colds, other than telling them to try to avoid all 200 of the viruses that office workers and schoolchildren are basically stewing in during the winter months. If you don't want to walk around in a hazmat suit, your only other option is to get sick 200 times. Just like with chickenpox, every time your body gets a cold, it cooks up a specially designed defense for the next time it invades. But since there are 200 different viruses that our bodies freak out about, you'll need to get over 200 colds before your body learns it's time for everybody to start acting like a couple of Fonzies and chill.

It's a little strange that medicines like NyQuil and DayQuil advertise themselves as "cold & flu relief." But we're not complaining. Cold and flu seasons overlap, so it works out for us that they've figured out how to treat a stuffy nose and an upset stomach with the same over-the-counter mind eraser.

The Reality

If you're experiencing stomach-related mayhem normally associated with the "stomach flu," you should know that according to people who went to medical school for seven years, the stomach flu is not actually a thing.

If your stomach has ever behaved like a violent, malfunctioning compression engine, chances are it was something called gastroenteritis, which can be caused by anything from a virus to food-borne parasites. Michael Jordan didn't have the flu during the flu game. Doctors at the time diagnosed him with gastroenteritis and thought it was probably caused by food poisoning. The word "flu" was never mentioned by anyone who had been to medical school, but it became known as the flu game because that's how people have been referring to that collection of symptoms for years.

This might seem like hair splitting, until you consider that we're using the same word for two deadly diseases that require completely different treatments. The real flu is primarily respiratory, and tends to feel like the cold on steroids. It can also lead to pneumonia, which can be fatal if you're in a Third World country or just have shitty health care. Meanwhile, correctly identifying gastroenteritis and treating it properly is the only surefire way to keep from shitting yourself to death. If you find yourself sliding into first when you feel something burst, and you go for the NyQuil because it says "flu" on the label, your best case scenario is green vomit that tastes like hell-flavored schnapps.

Another way that this myth bites us in our asses is with our understanding of the flu shot. People who get a flu shot and then come down with a stomach bug will assume that the flu shot didn't work. This is a scenario that's happening often enough to warrant official measures and awareness campaigns. And yet we still use the word "flu" when referring to a deadly illness that has nothing to do with the flu, because it's easier to pronounce, and because Gatorade probably couldn't have run an ad campaign on the 15th anniversary of the "vomiting with explosive diarrhea game."

What You've Heard

There are a few things most people know about concussions. First, when they wave a little flashlight pen in your eyes, they do something differently. Second, you might get a little sick to your stomach. If your second set of eyelids don't blink correctly and you get hit in the head so hard that your stomach gets upset, that adds up to the biggest, most important thing we all know about concussions: If you go to sleep with one, you don't wake up. That's why when Dwight smacked his head in The Office, Jim had to keep him awake by spraying him in the face with a water-filled Windex bottle. It's also why doctors have to try and evaluate the mental health of a screaming toddler because his mom kept him up for 26 hours straight after he smacked his head trying to walk down the stairs with his diaper around his ankles.

The Reality

Concussions happen when your brain smacks against the inside of your skull. It's a pretty violent injury, and symptoms can show up immediately or weeks later. One of the primary symptoms of a concussion is fatigue. This is not your body's way of playing a cruel trick on you. Your body is experiencing fatigue in order to tell you that your brain needs rest. Rest is, in fact, one of the best possible ways to treat a concussion.

Nothing about a concussion interferes with your ability to sleep or wake up. If you know someone who banged her head and wants to take a nap, you are not helping matters and in fact are most likely making her much, much worse by keeping her awake. Presumably, this myth was started by people who are unable to differentiate between victims of head trauma and people who are black-out drunk, aka other people who are black-out drunk. The symptoms are all about the same: nausea, exhaustion and an inability to put a coherent sentence together.

But in reality, your concussed friend needs immediate medical attention, and if she's completely incoherent, your black-out drunk friend probably needs medical attention, too, or at least some Taco Bell.

What You've Heard

Google "cure for cancer." Go ahead. We'll wait. If you did it right, you'll notice that the media likes to claim that a "cure" for cancer has been found. If you prefer to get your medical insight from Outkast, you might remember when Andre 3000 rapped about the need for a "cure for cancer, cure for AIDS" in "Bombs Over Baghdad." While Andre doesn't have the medical authority of fellow rap luminary Dr. Dre, nothing seems strange about that line. Cancer and AIDS are the two most high-profile killers of our era, and medical science has taught us that if we live long enough, we'll see them both eradicated like polio.

The Reality

The idea that cancer can be cured rests on the assumption that cancer is a single disease. Most of us recognize that lung cancer is not the same as breast cancer simply because they're both in the chest, but the fact that they're both cancer seems to suggest that they're at least the same type of disease. Unfortunately, that's not the case. Which is why Andre 3000's dream of finding a single "cure for cancer" is actually impossible.

This is yet another potentially deadly issue of semantics. The term "cancer" refers to over 200 completely different diseases. There are basic similarities among them and how they attack your body. They're certainly more similar to each other than they are to causes of death like heart attack or getting hit by a car. But the more we learn about cancer, the more we realize that they are, for all practical purposes, completely different diseases that require different treatments.

It's obvious why the people working on cancer research make it seem like it's possible to find the cancer equivalent of the polio vaccine. Funding is necessary to explore any treatment option. If they were honest and said that "Researchers May Have Discovered a Possible Lead in the Fight Against a Rare Form of Pancreatic Cancer, and It'll Be Years Before We Find Out if It Works or Not," then nobody would be very interested. "A CURE FOR CANCER HAS BEEN FOUND" is clearly the more effective attention grabber.

To see why this can be deadly, imagine two ads: one for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and one for the Cancer Fund of America. "Why just help out with one type of cancer, when I can help out all cancers?" you say, donating to the latter. What you don't know is that the former has an A+ Charity Watch rating, while the latter has an F. But the fact that there are so many charities out there organizing races for "The Cure" would suggest that the war on cancer is being funded by people whose understanding of advertising surpasses their understanding of what's actually at stake.

For more bullshit you probably believe, check out Your Mom Lied: 5 Common Body Myths Debunked and 6 Lies About the Human Body You Learned in Kindergarten.

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