Wait. We knew all this already

[elfs]

So, there's this article buzzing around the Internet: "Seven Medical Myths Even Doctors Believe," or some such. The "myths" they list are:

• People should drink at least eight glasses of water a day
• We use only 10% of our brains
• Hair and fingernails continue to grow after death
• Shaving hair causes it to grow back faster, darker, or coarser
• Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight
• Eating turkey makes people especially drowsy
• Mobile phones create considerable electromagnetic interference in hospitals.

The oddest thing about this article is that I thought we already knew all of these. Haven't articles like this been floating around the medical literature for years? Maybe not all collected in one place, but I know I saw an article about how the "64oz of fluids a day requirement" got translated into the "8 glasses a day myth" last year, and the bit about there not being enough tryptophan in turkey to cause drowsiness is a decade old, at least. Articles pointing out that there's no clinical evidence associating reading in dim light with long-term vision problems have been around at least since 2003.

I'm just surprised to see it all coming out so quickly; fully eight percent of my "You must read this" RSS feed was that one article, or some report on that article. It's just weird.

Comments

[blaisepascal]

Two governmental organization officially banned cell-phones from airplains. The FAA banned them because of concerns over avionics interference. I believe they recently lifted that ban because evidence is that it isn't a problem.

The FCC banned them because the cells weren't designed to deal wtih airborn phones. Handling hand-offs with phones which can be heard by 1-3 cells and stay within a cell for minutes to hours at a time is one thing, but when the phones are visible to 100 cells and stay within close-range to a given cell for under a minute, it's more difficult.