Medical Advice you Never Knew you Couldn’t Trust

For most of us, the bulk of the health knowledge that we carry around in our heads comes from medical advice that we’ve received from the unstudied, unscientific, hit and miss information that people love to share among themselves. Of course, a little knowledge can be dangerous thing. It can help us sometimes and it can harm us at others. Here are a few of the most enduring myths of our medical world and why you should guard against believing in them.

Let's start with a piece of mythical medical advice that seems to be particularly popular these days - it's the one that warns parents against getting their children vaccinated because vaccines are supposed to cause the flu (and autism as well for good measure). Here is what makes the typical caution you hear against vaccinating quite untrue. All the viruses in a flu vaccine are dead viruses. There is no way anyone's ever discovered to bring anything back to life from the dead - even viruses. And so, a vaccine cannot cause the flu. So where did the myths about vaccines causing autism come from? Most people trace its path to an article in the medical journal The Lancet. The 1998 article, carelessly made a passing mention of how a half-dozen parents wondered at how their children had received their autism diagnoses right after they had received their shots for mumps, measles and other childhood diseases. They were just a handful of parents and they weren't even suggesting that the vaccines could actually be the cause. Some parents who read this, who were somehow naturally suspicious of modern medicine, seized on the testimonies of these parents and accepted them as real proof. And now, they won't be swayed even when there are research articles published in other respected medical journals on tests done with hundreds of thousands of children that have not found that vaccines and autism are at all connected. But the damage is done. It appears to be difficult to convince people of anything when they like to believe in sketchy hypothetical stuff more than they do real scientific findings.

Another diehard piece of mythical medical advice that lots of people just believe in without adequate proof is the one that says that you can fall ill if you are cold. The fact that a cold is called a cold does do something to help the myth stay around too. The thing is, our bodies don't automatically become more susceptible to diseases when we are chilly. Temperature has nothing to do with it, and doctors have known about this for at least 50 years now. Even if you are drenched in icy cold water and you don't towel off and fill yourself with hot soup for a couple of hours, your body is no more likely to catch a cold than at any other time. And if you do already have a cold, exposing yourself to the cold doesn't make you any sicker. The only reason you get sick in the winter is because you tend to stay indoors where the air can be far more germ-polluted that outside.