Don't Cross Your Eyes...They'll Get Stuck That Way!: And 75 Other Health Myths Debunked (14 page)

No. It doesn’t work.

First of all, many people remove the “local” from the chapter’s title and just think that store-bought honey prevents allergies. That doesn’t even make sense. Store-bought honey wouldn’t contain the local pollens needed to make this possible. And most store-bought honey is sterilized before being packaged so it might not even contain the bad stuff you would need to induce a response.

Even if you get local honey, there are a few problems with this. First of all, the honey wouldn’t contain inactivated pollen. It would contain actual pollen, which could induce an allergic reaction. You could make the same argument that just by staying indoors, you would be exposed to small amounts of allergens from outside and get the same effectiveness. That doesn’t happen. On the other hand, experts tell us that swallowing some things we are allergic to sometimes helps our immune system react more tolerably to those things that cause our allergies. Other experts have wondered if honey might contain some sort of antihistamine, acting like the medicines that treat allergies. Neither seems to be the case for honey. Honey has been studied for allergies, and it does not seem to help. In a study of allergy sufferers who routinely had runny noses and irritated eyes from common outdoor allergies, neither local, unfiltered, unpasteurized honey, nor commercially available, filtered, pasteurized honey, improved their allergy symptoms any more than a placebo honey.

Honey is a lovely sweetener, but it is not going to make your allergies go away.

Hot Peppers

Hot peppers can cause ulcers

Constipation isn’t the only digestive issue that concerns people enough to make up myths. (See the chapter on cheese if you are worried about dairy and constipation.) Ulcers get their fair share of attention as well. Especially now that gastroesophageal reflux has saturated our consciousness and become a major source of pharmaceutical revenue. Many of us are obsessed with heartburn, and more specifically ulcers.

Ask someone what causes ulcers, and you may hear a number of different things. But most people, when they compile a list, will eventually get around to hot peppers. Like many myths, this one seems to make sense. Hot peppers are, well, hot. They burn your mouth. They can actually cause pain. And so it doesn’t seem like much of a leap to assume that they must be causing damage further down as well. It makes sense that, just as they feel like they are burning your mouth, they could be burning the lining of your stomach, causing an ulcer.

It’s just not true, though. To understand how this myth, like so many others, is the exact opposite of truth, we have to start with why hot peppers are hot. The heat you feel when you eat them is due to a substance called capsaicin. It has no odor, and it has no taste. Capsaicin is mostly found in the seeds and ribs of peppers, but it is also in the flesh of peppers as well. And when it comes into contact with the nerves in our digestive system, it definitely causes a reaction.

It’s important to recognize that this reaction is with the nerves, however. Just because something makes a nerve fire does not mean that it is affecting other cells in any way, certainly not in a bad way. In fact, capsaicin might be doing a lot of good. Studies have shown that capsaicin actually inhibits acid secretion in the stomach. It does not make you have more acid in your stomach (which could cause more ulcers or heartburn): capsaicin makes you have less acid! It also stimulates the secretion of more alkaline substances, which make the stomach even less acidic. It can also stimulate mucus secretion and mucosal blood flow in the stomach, which would act to help prevent or even heal ulcers. Capsaicin does a whole lot more good than harm with respect to ulcers.

Granted, much of this work has been done in rats and not humans, but it’s pretty convincing. Moreover, when you have good evidence that there might be protective effects, and no evidence that there are harmful effects, then claiming that something is bad for you is a myth.

As long as we’re on the subject, in recent years there has been a flurry of evidence that capsaicin might have other benefits as well. Capsaicin in creams has shown real promise for pain relief. There are promising leads showing that it might slow or stop the replication of prostate cells, which could be helpful for prostate cancer. It’s even been helpful in killing human pancreatic cancer cells in mice.

All of this needs further study. And, of course, hot peppers aren’t for everyone. That’s perfectly acceptable. We just can’t stand by and allow the perfectly healthy, and maybe even helpful, hot pepper be unfairly maligned and accused of being harmful.

Hydrogen Peroxide

Hydrogen peroxide is good for a wound

We want to say right off the bat that being concerned about the cleanliness of a wound is a good idea. You want your wounds to be clean. Washing them out is an excellent way to prevent infection. Washing them out with hydrogen peroxide, however, isn’t such a good idea. We know you’ve heard that it is an excellent antiseptic for wounds, but that, unfortunately, is a myth.

We know you are shocked. After all, many of you have used hydrogen peroxide. Hydrogen peroxide has been put on many a skinned knee or cut finger. You’ve seen it bubble and froth on the cut, which, you’ve been told, is how you know it’s working. It’s killing the germs, right there before your eyes. If only it were so.

There have been a number of well-designed studies that have examined how hydrogen peroxide works as an antiseptic. In 1987, in the
Journal of Family Practice
, a randomized controlled trial was conducted comparing topical antibiotics, antiseptics, and wound protectants on their ability to heal wounds. Forty-eight (daring) people volunteered to have six blisters inflicted on them, three on each arm, in such a way that they were infected with a bacteria called
Staphylococcus aureus
. Five different substances were placed on five different blisters, and the sixth was left alone. All the wounds were covered with occlusive dressings. Wounds treated with antibiotic ointments healed significantly faster than any other preparation, and were the only ones that had the infection cleared after two applications. Hydrogen peroxide didn’t do that. It did not help to clear the staph infection.

Another study, published in 2009 in the
Journal of Trauma
, exposed cultures of cells to a number of antiseptic solutions to see how they affected cell migration. They found that hydrogen peroxide actually hurt the healing process, by reducing both the migration and proliferation of fibroblasts, which are essential to wound healing. Remember that bubbling? It’s the hydrogen peroxide attacking your own cells as much as it is attacking anything infectious. The good cells are not able to come in and do the healing work that they are supposed to.

Adding insult to injury, a paper in the
Journal of Plastic, Reconstructive & Aesthetic Surgery
in 2010 reported on a woman who suffered from a heart attack that seemed to be brought on by an oxygen embolism that was caused by irrigation of a wound on her breast with hydrogen peroxide. Hydrogen peroxide killed her! We’re not suggesting this is common or likely to happen, but, as the authors of that report note, it should be factored into decisions that debate the pros and cons of using hydrogen peroxide. Let’s recap. Hydrogen peroxide does not appear to help prevent or treat infection in wounds. Hydrogen peroxide does appear to slow healing, and perhaps to cause cell damage. Other antiseptic solutions do appear to promote healing and fight infection. Continuing to believe that hydrogen peroxide is a good thing to use in a wound means continuing to believe in a myth.

Ice

If you cut off your finger, put it on ice right away

We are always amazed at how prepared some people are for the most bizarre kinds of injuries. Take cutting off a finger, for example. Ask a group of people what to do if this happens, and the vast majority will tell you that you should put the finger on ice right away.

First of all, why is everyone so fixated on the finger? You should be much more concerned about the person who lost the finger. Job one, every time, is to make sure the rest of the body (the actual person) is okay. Stabilize the person, make sure he or she isn’t bleeding profusely or in shock, and get them help if they need it. Then worry about the finger.

It is worth trying to protect the finger. The technology of surgery has improved such that fingers can still be reattached for up to twelve hours in a regular environment, and for much longer if cooled. Larger limbs with more muscle cannot last quite as long.

You should never give up hope. In 2005, a woman tied up her boyfriend to his bed. Then she cut off his penis and flushed it down the toilet. When rescue people responded, they pulled up the toilet from the floor, and found the penis trapped in an S curve in the pipes. And they still managed to reattach it. You have to love modern medicine.

After you have determined that the person who lost the finger is okay, by all means save the finger. Clean it off. But do not place it directly in ice. If you do so, it’s possible that parts of the finger could freeze. If that happens, then the tissues can be damaged in such a way that repair is impossible. For this reason, you should never, ever put a finger in dry ice either. That is way too cold.

Reputable sources recommend that the ideal way to save the finger is to wrap it in sterile gauze and soak it with saline. Then place the wrapped finger in a sealed plastic bag. That bag can be placed in ice. In the likely chance that you don’t have these materials, then you can wrap the finger in available cloth, wet it with water, and put that in a sealed plastic bag—which you can cool in ice. It’s important that the finger not be in direct contact with the ice, though. You don’t want it to freeze.

As always, it’s a good idea to be in contact with rescue services in an emergency situation. Not only will they help you get the person and finger to the appropriate facilities as soon as possible, but they will also be able to remind you of the necessary information in order to help both.

Immune System

If you catch a cold, it means you have a weak immune system

In some circles, catching a cold is a sign of weakness. Only those with a weakened immune system are thought to be susceptible to colds. So if you come down with something, it is considered a sign that something is wrong with your immune system.

This is not true! First of all, researchers have done many studies where they try to infect people with colds. They put various viruses that cause colds (rhinoviruses, respiratory syncytial viruses, coronaviruses, and so on) directly into the nostrils of healthy volunteers, and then they see who gets sick and who does not. Under normal conditions, with a normal mix of volunteers, many of the people who are exposed to a cold-causing virus will get sick. When you have cold viruses right in your nose, 75 to 90 percent of those exposed will get sick. That means that lots of normal, strong people still get sick when they are exposed to a nasty virus. People with certain immune deficiencies or disorders of their immune system are, indeed, even more likely to get sick, but most people who get colds do not have problems with their immune system. In one study where 394 healthy subjects had cold viruses put right into their noses, there was no difference in the immune systems of those who got infected and those who stayed healthy when they measured things like while cell counts and total immunoglobulin levels.

Another important thing to remember is that it is normal to get quite a number of colds. Children, in particular, frequently get colds. It is normal for a child to have six to ten colds a year, and that seems like a great deal to parents and everyone involved, but it is normal. Having that many colds does not mean that there is a problem with the child’s immune system. Adults do not get quite as many colds either; they get two to four colds a year on average. But it is normal for adults to continue to be exposed to new strains of viruses or to new viruses altogether, and we quite commonly get sick from them. Even if our immune systems are perfectly normal.

That study of 394 volunteers exposed to colds did reveal a different, interesting fact about who was more likely to get sick: having more psychological stress was associated with an increased risk of getting a cold. The more psychological stress a volunteer had, the more likely they were to get infected with the cold virus. Other factors that could have explained the connection between stress and getting sick did not explain it away: in this study, smoking, how much alcohol you drank, your exercise, your diet, how well you slept, and the measures of your immune system did not change whether you got infected compared to your psychological stress. Personality did not matter either. Your level of self-esteem, your personal control, and whether you were introverted or extroverted did not change how likely you were to be infected; it was just your level of psychological stress. It is important to note that smoking by itself renders you significantly more susceptible to colds as well. Based on this study, being under psychological stress does not weaken your immune system in the obvious ways; it does not decrease how many white blood cells you have to fight infections or change the levels of antibodies against infections. But, somehow, those under psychological stress did get infected with colds more often.

While a weak immune system is not to blame, there are a number of interesting factors that are associated with being more susceptible to colds. Psychological stress is one, as we have mentioned. Another issue is not sleeping for very long or not having good quality sleep. People who have a more diverse social network, meaning that they have more friends, family, and work connections, are also less likely to develop colds. How these factors work are not exactly known. The studies are not cause-and-effect studies that tell us how these factors could help or hurt our bodies’ susceptibility to colds. Nonetheless, getting enough sleep and trying to decrease stress might be helpful in protecting yourself from colds.

Lice