Don't Cross Your Eyes...They'll Get Stuck That Way!: And 75 Other Health Myths Debunked (20 page)

However, sneezing can change how your heart beats. The process of sneezing can actually slow down how fast your heart is beating for a moment, and this change in the heart’s rhythm is likely why people believe that sneezing stops their heart. When you sneeze, you take a big breath or inhalation in. This increases the pressure inside your chest. Then, the powerful contracting of your muscles when you sneeze causes the pressure to increase again. These changes in pressure, which combine with changes in blood flow to and from the heart, temporarily slow how fast your heart beats. As the rate changes, you may have the feeling that your heart has skipped a beat or even that your heart has stopped. Your heart never stops; it just slows down a bit.

Starting to feel sniffly? The most important thing to remember about sneezing may be that it sends your mucus up to five or six feet around you, all propelling out at 100 miles an hour. Any germs that are making you sick can really get spread around. So, cover your nose and mouth as best you can, and keep washing your hands!

Snow

Sitting in the snow will give you a urinary tract infection

One of our colleagues is from Sweden, and she swears to us that this is a popular myth over there, which proves two things: first, that no country is immune from believing medical myths, and second, that some health myths are regional. We have found no evidence that this myth is true (or even that it has been studied), and, guess what: it’s just not true. You can’t catch a urinary tract infection from sitting in the snow.

As long as we have your attention, though, we might as well talk to you about the other myths and truths about urinary tract infections. First off, they are very common. They account for more than eight million visits to the doctor each year, and about 20 percent of women will have at least one over the course of their lives. Urinary tract infections in children are not rare. By the time they are five, almost one in ten girls will have had a urinary tract infection, and 1 to 2 percent of boys will have had one as well.

So what does make you more likely to have a urinary tract infection? The biggest risk factor, by far, is being female. Why? Well, that is simply because it’s much harder for bacteria to get into a male’s bladder than a woman’s. We’ll give you a minute to picture the different anatomy and imagine why that’s so. See? The penis has so many uses. There is a much longer distance from the tip of a penis to a male’s bladder than from the vagina to a female’s bladder. Urinary tract infections are pretty uncommon in males, but when they occur they are often serious and an indication that something else is wrong.

Sexual activity increases the risk of a urinary tract infection, as do certain types of birth control, such as diaphragms and spermicidal agents. This is likely due to the fact that you’re putting foreign objects close to the urethra, and, well, bacteria on them might infect you. Sorry, but it’s true.

Women who have gone through menopause are at increased risk for urinary tract infections because low estrogen levels change the urinary tract in ways that leave it more likely to be infected. People with diabetes or other disorders that can reduce the effectiveness of the immune system can also be at increased risk. Children who have physical abnormalities of the urinary tract are much more likely to develop urinary tract infections.

Now on to things that are not risk factors. Studies have shown that pregnant women are no more likely to get urinary tract infections than women who are not pregnant. However, urinary tract infections in pregnant women, when they do occur, can be more serious as bacteria more often move up to the kidneys from the bladder. This may be due to hormonal changes that occur in pregnancy that make it easier for the bacteria to move.

Another thing that gets a bad rap is bubble baths for children. Pediatricians like us often tell parents not to let children sit in bubble baths because it increases the risk of urinary tract infections in children. However, a good review of the literature found that, while bubble baths might cause some external irritation in the vagina, there is no link proving that they increase urinary tract infections. And kids love bubble baths. So it’s just as likely that depriving them of the bubble baths will decrease the likelihood that they might bathe. We want children to bathe!

To recap: anatomical abnormalities, menopause, sex, and being a woman make you more likely to get a urinary tract infection. Pregnancy doesn’t make them more common, but does make them more serious. And bubble baths are unfairly maligned. Oh, and by the way, snow has nothing to do with them at all. Sorry, Sweden.

Soap

Using soap is the best way to clean your hands

One of the most important messages we’ve tried to get across in this book is that washing your hands is key to avoiding a whole slew of illnesses, especially the common cold. Avoiding cold weather, dressing warmly, and making sure you dry your hair completely before heading outside will not keep you healthy. Neither vitamin C, nor echinacea, nor zinc, nor Airborne, nor Emergen-C will prevent you from catching a cold. Amidst all these things that don’t work, hand-washing is a clear winner.

Washing your hands makes you much less likely to be infected with the germs that cause all sorts of nasty problems like diarrhea or colds. In the literature about infections, experts recommend hand-washing time and time again. The general principle is that you should wet your hands with running water, put some soap on your hands, lather up, and then rub your hands together vigorously for at least twenty seconds. (That is a much longer time than you think. We bet it is much longer than you usually wash your hands.) Then you should rinse off your hands and dry them. Hand-washing is recommended after you prepare food, use the toilet, change diapers, touch animals, blow your nose, cough, handle garbage, or touch a sick person.

Many people assume that soap and water are vital when it comes to washing your hands. This is a half-truth. Using soap and water is the classic way to wash your hands, and it does remove much of the bacteria from your hands. However, just having soap and water is not necessarily good enough. Whether the hand-washing is going to protect you depends on the length of time you wash, how much soap you use, what type of soap you use, and how the soap is stored. Soap alone is not enough! The longer you wash, especially when you wash for more than fifteen seconds, the more bacteria you remove from your hands. Using more soap rather than less soap also improves the cleaning abilities, as does using an antimicrobial soap.

However, you cannot put your complete trust in soap. Soap can actually become contaminated with bacteria. Soap contamination has led to outbreaks of infections in places like neonatal intensive care units in hospitals, and bacteria can be cultured from soap in hospitals all around the world. Bar soaps and soaps that are stored improperly, especially in standing water, are more likely to be contaminated. If your only choice for washing your hands is a very dirty bar of soap sitting in grimy water on the edge of a sink, you may be better off skipping the soap altogether and maximizing the other elements of good hand-washing. In such a case, you should use lots of friction between your hands and wash for a long time. Using paper towels instead of the hot air dryer is also a very good idea.

Soap also becomes less important when you consider its competitor—the alcohol-based hand rub. These hand sanitizers have become popular around hospitals, offices, and schools for a very good reason. They work great! In most studies, alcohol-based hand rubs do better than hand-washing with soap and water at removing bacteria from the skin. There are a few types of bugs that cause infection through spores that seem to come off better with very vigorous hand-washing with soap and water, but the hand sanitizers win overall. If your only option is a hand sanitizer and not soap and water, you should be happy the hand sanitizer is actually the better choice. Moreover, not only does the hand sanitizer remove more bacteria from your hands, it is also cost-effective when you compare it to washing with soap and water.

We are still big fans of soap, but soap can’t make it on its own. You need to make sure you wash your hands long enough, with enough friction, and with a noncontaminated soap. Plus, using an alcohol-based hand gel or sanitizer may be a better choice.

Solid Foods

If you wait longer to start solid foods, your baby won’t get as many allergies

The origins of some myths are difficult to figure out. This is not one of those myths. And, to some extent, we physicians are to blame.

For the first few months of life, the only thing babies are supposed to eat is breast milk or formula. That’s it. No water, no juice, no foods. But as babies get older, they have to start eating solid foods. Usually we recommend that they start with cereals around four months of age, progress to vegetables or fruits around six months, and then finally on to more complex foods.

The process by which babies are introduced to new foods has been made more and more complicated over time. You can imagine that mothers long ago did not really think too hard about what foods were introduced or when. But today, we usually recommend starting one new food at a time, and giving that food alone for at least a few days. That way, if the baby is allergic to that food, we can find out in the least confusing manner. If the baby starts several foods at the same time and has a bad reaction, we would not know which food was causing the problem.

This focus on allergies is not limited to when you start foods. For some time, there was a lot of confusion and debate on when to start introducing solid foods. Many believed that delaying the introduction of solid foods would make it much less likely that babies would have allergic difficulties.

Allergies are a pretty big deal. According to the CDC, about 4 percent of children have a food or digestive allergy. Some of these reactions are quite severe. Moreover, children who have food allergies are also much more likely to have other disorders or allergies. So preventing allergies or limiting their development is important.

Unfortunately, the recommendations to delay the introduction of solid foods were not based on good science. In fact, a 2006 systematic review looking at all the studies on this issue concluded that there really was no evidence to support a connection between early feedings of solid foods and asthma, allergic rhinitis, animal dander allergy, or persistent food allergies. (Aaron was actually a co-author of that study.)

Since then, several more well-designed studies have confirmed that there is no link between starting foods early and developing allergies. Many medical organizations have adjusted their recommendations to no longer promote delaying introduction of solid foods to prevent allergies. And, in 2010, a study published in
Pediatrics
found evidence that the late introduction of “potatoes (>4 months), oats (>5 months), rye (>7 months), wheat (>6 months), meat (>5.5 months), fish (>8.2 months), and eggs (>10.5 months)” was actually linked to an increased risk of developing allergies.

As always, you should talk with your pediatrician about the best time to introduce solid foods for your baby. There is no one correct answer for every baby, and it is a personal decision. You and your doctor should know, however, that delaying the introduction of solid foods in order to prevent food allergies is a myth.

Sponges

Wiping everything with a sponge will keep the bathroom or kitchen clean

If reading about all the germs in your house does not inspire you to start cleaning, we don’t know what will. But before you go and do so, you should seriously consider how you will do so. Many of you use a sponge to clean in the bathroom or kitchen. Sponges are certainly common cleaning tools and seem like a good weapon to attack all of those bugs, spills, and stains. Is this a good idea, though?

Likely no. You see, contrary to what you might think, sponges become contaminated with germs when they wash things. The more things you wash, and the longer you use the sponge, the dirtier it gets. Soon, it starts transferring germs to other surfaces.

There’s research to back this up. In a study published in 2002 in the
International Journal of Food Microbiology
, scientists specifically examined how germs found in food moved around the kitchen during cleaning. One part of the study looked at how germs were transferred from a sponge to surfaces in the kitchen. They found that, on average, wiping a 20x30 centimeter surface clean transferred less than a gram of liquid. However, depending on the concentration of bugs in previously washed items, both salmonella and E. coli could be transferred from the sponge to other surfaces in the kitchen.

Another study examined what items in the home had germs on them. Items with what was deemed a “high” count included drain traps (91 percent), sinks (67 percent), and, yes, sponges (78 percent). The germs detected included such horrors as E. coli,
Staphylococcus aureus,
and
Pseudomonas aeruginosa.
Sponges in the bathroom were also noted to have high counts of bacteria. For comparison purposes, the percentage of toilet seats or bowl rims with high counts were only 1 to 2 percent. It’s crazy. The toilet is probably cleaner than your sponge!

So what can you do? Well, there have actually been studies of methods to clean sponges. They include rinsing, bleach, and putting them in the dishwasher. The best method, however, seems to be microwaving. Wetting a sponge and putting it in the microwave for one to two minutes will kill more than 99 percent of the germs that could be hiding in there.

Of course, you could also try more disposable cleaning materials, which don’t have the lifespan to build up too many pathogens. Regardless, if you haven’t replaced your sponge or microwaved it in some time, be afraid. Or at least be more afraid of it than of the much cleaner items in your kitchen and bathroom.

Steam

I have just the thing for that cold … Hot Steam

Another remedy you may hear about when you have a cold is to inhale hot steam. Whether sitting in the bathroom with a hot shower running or using a hot steam vaporizer, doctors and grandmothers alike advise that heated, humidified air will help cold sufferers. The idea is that hot steam will loosen up mucus in the nose or chest, enabling it to drain better, so that you can cough or blow it out. Some people also believe that the heat will kill any lingering cold viruses.