3

If You Haven't Had A Heart Attack Already, Don't Take Aspirin Daily

Everybody knows that a daily low dose of aspirin does for your blood what lunch at Chipotle does for your bowels: keeps things flowin'. But the fact of the matter is that while aspirin's blood-thinning effects can sometimes help prevent heart attacks in a very specific subset of people (namely, those who've already experienced a heart attack), it was never recommended by the medical community at large as a catch-all preventative solution. Yes, we know it's a shocking revelation that you can't put your trust in marketing slogans, but despite what that "Heart Health Advantage" logo subtly displayed on your bottle of Bayer might suggest, studies have shown that aspirin's benefits as pertains to preventing a first heart attack or stroke are just about bupkis.

That wouldn't be so bad if the misconception resulted in nothing more than who knows how many people popping a daily placebo, but that's not the case. Taking regular doses of aspirin contributes to all manner of maladies, including gastrointestinal bleeding in otherwise healthy women, fatal bleeds in elderly patients, decreasing the effectiveness of prostate cancer screenings in men, and effecting a net increase in the likelihood of a repeat heart attack or stroke in the 30 percent of cardiovascular disease sufferers who are aspirin-resistant. As a result, Bayer's aforementioned marketing campaign was not only deemed false, but has also earned them a hefty $15 million class action settlement. Not quite a heart-attack-worthy amount for such a massive company, but slightly better than a placebo.

Bayer
Or about 1/3,500th of their earnings that year. Yippee for the FDA, we guess.

2

Don't Deep-Freeze Any Severed Appendages To "Keep Them Fresh"

Kitchen knives slip, passing comets bring lawn mowers to murderous life, hands turn evil and must be chainsawed off. You know, shit happens. And we all know that the proper course of action in such a circumstance is to stop the bleeding, clean the wound, and toss the recently separated body part on a bed of ice like shrimp at an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet.

But that's not always the best solution: When Seattleite Jim Beaty table-sawed the tip clean off his finger while doing home renovations in 2010, he and his wife tossed it in a Tupperware container and covered it with ice. When they arrived at the emergency room, they discovered how bad an idea that was. Especially in cases involving small body parts, such as fingers and toes, direct contact with ice rapidly causes freezer burn and damages tissue beyond repair. Instead, they should have wrapped the finger in a clean, damp cloth and kept it cold, not frozen. Basically, treat your severed body parts less like Hot Pockets and more like a fine steak, and you might get to keep that hand.

1

Don't Do Pretty Much Anything You Think You Should Do For A Snakebite

According to classic Western movie wisdom, the steps to treat a bite from a venomous snake are 1) tie a tourniquet above the bite to prevent the poison from making its way into the rest of your body, 2) hack into the bite, probably using the same knife you employed to kill that bastard snake, and 3) suck out the poison. If you can't manage to reach the site of the wound with your own mouth, a companion's mouth will do. This is what old-timey cowboys referred to as "bonding."

And that is a great list ... of things you absolutely should not do in the event of a snakebite.

While tying off a tourniquet seems like a no-brainer, keeping all the venom trapped in one area only serves to cause necrosis, meaning that the venom effectively kills whatever part of the body you trapped it in, thereby leaving doctors no choice but to give it the ol' Civil War Chop. Cutting the wound only serves to introduce more damaged tissue for the venom to interact with, and increases the chance of infection. And sucking on the wound is, let's face it, just plain gross. (And also completely pointless.)

What you should actually do is remain calm (getting your heart rate up will only serve to spread the venom faster), not drink caffeine or alcohol (the latter of which, of course, flies directly in the face of the "remain calm" bit), remove any jewelry and tight clothing before you do a terrible Michelin Man impersonation, and, most importantly, get your snake-bitten ass to a doctor for a nice fat dose of antivenin. No tying of ropes, cutting, or sucking at all. That makes for a boring Friday night, but it is how you survive a snakebite.

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