Don't Cross Your Eyes...They'll Get Stuck That Way!: And 75 Other Health Myths Debunked (15 page)

You can only get lice from another person with lice

The mere mention of lice makes our heads start itching. As pediatricians, we often see children in our clinics with lice, and it never fails to make us start scratching our own heads when we leave the room. You may remember the days in school when someone in the class had lice, and then everyone in the class had to have their heads examined closely for the foul louse. Rachel had very long hair, which was a nightmare for the thorough lice checkers.

Lice are tiny creepy, crawling bugs that live on the head or the hair of the head. They can be tough to see because they are gray or brown and only an eighth of an inch long. The grown-up lice lay eggs that are called nits. These nits or eggs may look like loose white dandruff or flakes in someone’s hair, but they are actually stuck very tightly to the strands of hair and do not wash off easily. Lice are baby-making machines. A female louse lives for only thirty days, but she can lay more than 2,600 eggs! Female lice can actually store sperm inside themselves, so mating just once allows them to lay fertilized eggs for their entire lives.

Lice can definitely spread through direct contact with someone else who has head lice. If your head touches the head of a person with lice, their lice can happily—for them—move onto your head and set up camp in your hair. Head lice do not jump or fly, so for a long time people thought that this kind of direct contact was the only way that lice moved from one person to another. Lice require human beings in order to stay alive, and many people have thought that only the adult lice were strong enough to infect another person.

Unfortunately, you can also get lice even if you do not come into direct contact with an infected person’s head. You can get lice from sharing a comb, hat, headband, or any other hair accessory with someone who has lice. You can get lice from baseball caps, earphones, pillowcases, and upholstered furniture. Both teenaged lice (called nymphs) and adult lice can live for up to three days when they are not on human beings. The eggs can survive and still hatch into more lice for ten days. (Rachel is scratching her head just contemplating these numbers.) Scientists have tested whether lice can transfer from a scenario where a single strand of hair touches a louse that is on a suspended thread of the sort that you would have on an upholstered chair or a pillowcase. The louse can do it! Another study examined whether lice could be transferred from pillowcases. This study found that, while some lice did move onto the pillowcase at night, only a small number did so. It is possible for the lice to get on the pillowcase and subsequently infect a new person, but it is a much less common way to get infected than being in close contact with someone’s head or comb. Even though the risk of being infected from a pillowcase is low, the number of lice that did transfer onto the pillowcases pointed to the need to change pillowcases so you are not reinfected with lice and so that other people are not infected. Lice can be killed from pillowcases by immersing the pillowcase in hot water, by washing in hot water, or by fifteen minutes in a hot clothes dryer.

Lice also have a natural instinct to move quickly away from the light or to move when the hairs in which they are living are disturbed. This makes them very quick at finding new places where they can live, even if that new place is farther away from their original head of hair. Studies of lice movement also find lice crawling on the pillows of people with lice or on the towels of people with lice who have just shampooed, washed, and dried their hair. Combing the hair of someone with lice with a normal comb leaves lice on the comb, on the ground, and on the clothing of the person who does the combing. Hair blow-dryers can also send lice flying into the air, where they can land on other people or on fabrics where they wait around for new people to infect. You can vacuum lice up with a regular vacuum cleaner, but hand vacuums do not pick up all the lice and nits, which can then cause more infestations. Because of how lice spread and flee onto whatever surface they can, most school nurses (who often deal with a lot of lice issues) recommend vacuuming the floors and furniture that have been in contact with someone with lice.

Because lice are so incredibly infectious, it can be really hard to get rid of them, especially once someone in your house has them. Getting lice does not mean that you are dirty or living in bad conditions; it just means that these wily little buggers made a successful attack on your head. To get rid of lice, your best bet is to use a special shampoo designed to kill lice, and then to comb the hair with a special comb designed to help get rid of the sticky nits attached to the hairs. You should consult your doctor about which medicated shampoo to use, especially since some are not safe for young children or pregnant women. In addition to the rounds of shampooing and combing, a lot of cleaning has to go on! Because lice and their eggs can survive on things like pillowcases and hats, you should launder everything that the infected person might have come in contact with. This means washing their bedsheets and towels, and vacuuming all the floors, carpets, and upholstery in the house.

Marriage

Marriage makes you healthy

From as far back as the 1850s, studies of married people versus single people seem to show that you are much better off if you are married. In study after study, married people have been found to be healthier. They seem to live longer, to be less likely to get cancer or to have a heart attack, to get sick less often, and to heal faster than single people. In a meta-analysis that combined the results of marriage studies for more than 250,000 elderly people, those who were widowed, divorced, or single were all at a higher risk of death than those who were married. Changes in marital status, such as becoming widowed or getting a divorce, have been associated with having more health problems in many studies. Marriage seems like a key to good health. In fact, the U.S. government’s Healthy Marriage Initiative cites a huge number of benefits from healthy marriages—everything from being physically and emotionally healthier, to having more stable employment and higher wages.

Before you race out to get married or decide that you need to stay married no matter what, you need to understand an important principle behind all of these studies—it matters a great deal whether the marriage is a healthy one or not. A
New York Times
columnist (and one of our favorite health journalists), Tara Parker-Pope, has catalogued the many studies of marriage and health in her book
For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage.
As she summarizes from the many studies, being married alone is not enough to make you healthy. It matters very much whether your marriage is a healthy and happy one. If a person is in a troubled or stressful marriage, he or she is actually less likely to be healthy than a person who was never married at all. A change in your marital status can also lead to more significant health problems; in a study following close to 9,000 men and women, people who became divorced or had a spouse die were more likely to have health problems than people who had never been married.

The quality of the marital relationship matters more than whether you are married. Not only are people in troubled marriages in poorer health than people in strong marriages, but individuals in a troubled marriage have greater health risks than those who are divorced. For example, studies of marital stress and health have found that the immune systems of women in unhappy relationships do not respond as well as the immune systems of women in happy relationships or women who have happily left a relationship. Another study shows that married couples who argue with each other were connected with slower healing of physical wounds on their skin, with the slowest healing for couples who argued with the most hostility. Being in a bad marriage can physically hurt your heart; women with more marital stress are at higher risk of having heart attacks, and married men who have high-conflict fights with their spouses have worse scores on certain heart health ratings. The effects of marital strain also appear to affect a person’s health more as people are older. In other words, being in a stressful marriage is more likely to have an even worse effect on your health as you get older. This is another argument against sticking it out in a troubled marriage for any supposed health benefits.

The summary of the current studies of marriage is that marriage can be a great thing for your health—if the marriage is a healthy one! Any unhappy marriage can actually make your health worse, and you should not try to stick it out in a problematic relationship just because you think it will be good for your health. Sadly, the very opposite may be true.

Masturbation

Masturbation will make you go blind

There seem to be as many warnings about masturbation as there are supposed cures for the common cold. (That means there are a lot!) Masturbation is thought to harm you in all sorts of ways. Masturbation will make you go blind. Masturbation will make you grow hair on your palms. Masturbating too much will make you go crazy. Masturbation will make you impotent later in life. Masturbation will make your penis curved. Masturbation will make you unable to have orgasms during regular sex. You shouldn’t need to masturbate if you are in a relationship with another person. Masturbation will make you not a virgin. Masturbation will sap your strength. All of these ideas are myths!

One of the most famous proponents of these masturbation myths was none other than the creator of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg was a nutritionist and talented surgeon who revolutionized what Americans eat for breakfast. He also happened to be very opposed to sex. Although he was married, he seems to have been abstinent throughout his marriage. Dr. Kellogg was especially against masturbation. He thought masturbation not only caused all of the usual terrible things like blindness and impotence, but also tuberculosis, epilepsy, heart disease, personality changes, and acne. In fact, Dr. Kellogg thought that eating healthy food like Corn Flakes would make people masturbate less. Dr. Kellogg may have been smart about creating breakfast foods, but he was not so smart about masturbation. Eat all the Corn Flakes you want; it is not going to change your masturbating practices.

The evidence that masturbation will not make you blind or make hair grow on your palms is overwhelming. Lots and lots of people masturbate. In fact, even back in the 1940s, 94 percent of males and 40 percent of females reported having masturbated to orgasm. These numbers have only increased, with the percentage of females reporting that they have masturbated at 70 percent or more. In one study in the United States, half of American women reported using a vibrator. It is normal to masturbate. And yet, while lots and lots of people are masturbating, not many people in the world are blind. Even fewer people grow hair on their palms. While mental illness is a real and common problem, it has no connection with masturbation. If masturbation really caused any of these problems, you would see lots and lots of blind, hairy, crazy people all around you. It just does not happen.

Even people who masturbate more than the average do not have physical problems from their masturbation. Researchers have looked closely at people who masturbated an average of four or more times a day over the course of years, and they were not any more likely to have any diseases than the people who masturbated less. Men who ejaculate more often are not going to run out of sperm or become impotent. People who masturbate do not need to worry about their performance in sports or other feats of strength. Having sex or masturbating does not change how well you do on a treadmill and does not seem to change your strength, balance, reaction time, or aerobic power.

Masturbation is not going to deform your penis either. Many men have curved penises or penises that are not perfectly straight. This is completely normal and has nothing to do with whether or not they masturbate. It should not have any negative impact on their experience of sex, although we would recommend talking with a doctor if you have a specific concern about any part of your anatomy.

Masturbation can be a perfectly normal, healthy practice whether you are in a relationship or not. Giving yourself sexual pleasure can be an important way to practice sex, and it is probably the safest form of sex. Knowing what gives you pleasure can also lead to experiencing more pleasure with your partner. Masturbating should not ruin you for sex with another person. It can be a good alternative to sex with someone else, or it can be a healthy way to supplement your sexual relationship with your partner.

Mercury

Your amalgam or metal fillings will make you sick

Mercury has gotten such a bad rap in recent years that it’s hard to remember why it was ever considered good in the first place. Though there’s no real evidence showing it’s a problem, people don’t like the mercury in vaccines. There’s the mercury in fish, which no one likes. And there’s plain old mercury in a number of work sources that causes neurotoxicity, and absolutely no one likes that. So it’s no wonder that we finally got around to being upset about the mercury in our dental fillings.

Why is it there in the first place? Well, dentists use it because it works. A dental amalgam filling is 52 percent mercury and 48 percent copper, zinc, and silver. Mercury, an odd metal that is in liquid form at room temperature, binds the other particles together into a tough, long-lasting compound.

So what’s the problem? Well, the reason that so many people are concerned about mercury is that there is a fairly large amount of research that shows it’s terrible for you. Mercury toxicity has been linked to fatigue, memory loss, and depression. It’s also bad for the immune system, and has been shown to interfere with the production of immunoglobulins and antibodies in animal studies. And the fact that mercury got tied into the whole vaccine mess didn’t help.

But what makes this a myth is the fact that, while mercury is bad for you, it is much harder to say that the mercury in your fillings is bad for you. For one thing, it is a different kind of mercury. For instance, the mercury in fish is methylmercury, which is an organic mercury. Methylmercury is mostly absorbed in the digestive system and is much more toxic than, for instance, mercury vapor. Mercury vapor is absorbed mostly in the lungs. The mercury in amalgam fillings is elemental mercury, and—you guessed it—it’s released as mercury vapor.