Don't Cross Your Eyes...They'll Get Stuck That Way!: And 75 Other Health Myths Debunked (16 page)

Moreover, there are simply no good studies proving that people with mercury amalgam fillings have worse health outcomes, like those above, than those without. And it’s not as though those studies would be difficult to do. There are many millions of people with amalgam fillings in their mouths right now. Aaron’s got one. Rachel’s got many. And any proof of Aaron’s superiority cannot be blamed on Rachel having more amalgam fillings.

In fact, such a study has been performed. Scientists looked at two different databases: (1) ninety patients who were part of a clinical trial that removed amalgam fillings in people who thought their health complaints were due to the fillings, and (2) 116 patients from an environmental medicine clinic who thought their symptoms were due to environmental sources, and not the fillings. They found that the amalgam-blaming group more frequently reported mental symptoms while the environment-blaming group had more physical symptoms. Overall, there was no proof of an amalgam-specific syndrome.

Nonamalgam fillings are much more expensive. Many patients simply can’t afford them. And fillings are really important to dental health. There are lots of studies that show that having good teeth is a very important part of being healthy overall. People are much better off getting amalgam fillings than nothing, and amalgam fillings are not proven to be bad for your health.

Eating fish while you are pregnant will give your baby birth defects

Most pregnant women want to do whatever it takes to have the healthiest baby possible. Many women quit smoking and avoid drinking alcohol. (And, as pediatricians, we should quickly note that not smoking and not drinking alcohol are proven to be very good ideas for your growing baby!) Pregnant women also try to choose foods that will be safe and healthy for their developing baby. They are instructed to avoid deli meats, sushi, and soft cheeses because of the potential for these foods to harbor dangerous bacteria. They are also told to avoid eating fish because it can contain too much mercury and other toxins.

Whether or not pregnant women should eat fish is a dilemma. Exposure to too much mercury can cause problems for the development of a baby’s brain. Too much mercury is not good for any human being, but it is especially problematic when a baby is in the womb and their brains are still developing. Many people have been worried about a connection between being exposed to mercury and developmental delays. While the science on this connection is not conclusive, the concerns make people understandably eager to avoid taking in too much mercury. Fish and shellfish can contain mercury, and so many pregnant women are told to avoid eating them. Even if the risks are relatively small, it makes sense to be extra careful to protect a developing baby.

Eating fish may also impact how big the baby grows. Eating lean fish is also associated with a lower risk of having a baby that is smaller than they should be (this is a good thing). In contrast, eating more servings of canned tuna and shellfish have been associated with a higher risk of having babies that are smaller than they should be. Whether this is related to the amount of mercury in canned tuna or shellfish or whether it is related to something else about these types of fish has not yet been figured out.

Eating fish can be beneficial for both pregnant women and their developing babies. Fish is a good source of protein and contains lots of omega-3 fatty acids, which are considered healthy for our hearts and brains. A review of the research about fish and shellfish that was published in 2006 in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
found that eating more fish was associated with many good things for your body; eating more fish was connected with having less heart disease, fewer deaths from heart disease, and fewer deaths overall. (Perhaps we should recommend a fish a day instead of an apple!) In contrast, the risks from mercury and the other toxins in fish were found to be very low in the studies that were identified. Given the strong benefits from fish and the low risks, this review recommends that even pregnant women should eat fish.

Recent studies have gone even further. They not only find no increase in birth defects among the children of mothers who ate fish, but also that the children of pregnant women who ate fish actually have better scores on tests of their brain development when they are four years old. Even if too much mercury has a potential to cause problems for developing babies, the benefits of fish for the brain may outweigh the risks!

If you want to get the benefits from fish while keeping your risk of mercury poisoning as low as possible, you can eat fish that are extra safe. Some fish contain a lot more mercury than other types of fish. This can also vary from one region to another, so you might want to check what fish are available and recommended where you live. The general recommendations from the United States Department of Health and Human Services state that pregnant women should avoid the fish that have the highest levels of mercury. This means avoiding shark, swordfish, mackerel, and tilefish. The department also recommends that you should not eat more than six ounces of white tuna, albacore tuna, or tuna steak per week. In one week, a pregnant woman should not eat more than two servings or twelve ounces of fish. In general, good fish choices for pregnant women are shrimp, salmon, pollock, catfish, and light tuna, and there may be other fish in your area that are recommended.

Milk

A glass of warm milk will put you to sleep

Warm milk is one of the first recommendations for insomnia. If you cannot sleep, a glass of warm milk is supposed to have you snoozing away in no time. Over a thousand years ago, even the Talmud recommended drinking milk to help you sleep. Many people continue to believe that warm milk will get them snoring quickly. In one study, a third of elderly patients who had tried something to help them sleep in the last year reported that they drank milk to try to get to sleep. Warm milk is one of the most common strategies people use to battle their insomnia.

Unfortunately for the exhausted insomniacs reading this book in the middle of the night, there is no scientific evidence that warm milk will help you sleep. While some patients report that milk helps them sleep, there are no studies showing any benefit in terms of how long it takes to fall asleep or for how long one sleeps.

Some people claim that warm milk is a great cure for insomnia because milk contains tryptophan. You may know that turkey contains tryptophan, and many people blame this substance as the reason why turkey makes you sleepy. Both milk and turkey do contain tryptophan, but you cannot blame the tryptophan from either one for putting you to sleep. (If you read our book,
Don’t Swallow Your Gum!
, you may remember that turkey does
not
make you sleepy.) Neither milk nor turkey contains exceptional amounts of tryptophan. Turkey contains about the same amount of tryptophan per gram as ground beef or chicken—0.24 gram of tryptophan per 100 grams of the food. Eggs and cheese contain much more tryptophan per gram than turkey, at 0.3 to 1 gram of tryptophan per gram of food. And milk? A mere 0.08 gram of tryptophan per gram of milk. Not much at all! You need much more tryptophan than that to put you to sleep. An egg and cheese sandwich would be a better bet for the tryptophan, but even with that you would need to eat a lot of sandwiches to get enough tryptophan to have an effect. Moreover, tryptophan is not absorbed well with food. Other people claim that milk somehow changes how tryptophan is absorbed by the body, but there is no science to support that milk helps you sleep by changing how different types of tryptophan are absorbed.

What does work to help you sleep? One of the more effective ways to help you sleep without taking drugs is to use stimulus control therapy. In this technique, you try to retrain yourself to associate the bed with being sleepy. If you are unable to sleep within twenty minutes, you are supposed to leave the bedroom and return only when you are very sleepy. You also avoid doing things like reading or watching television in bed. The only thing you are supposed to do in bed is sleep there. This could actually become one of the ways that milk would work to help someone sleep. If one believes strongly that warm milk makes you sleepy, then this might become a strong enough association in your own mind that milk will help you feel sleepy. Relaxing your muscles slowly, one by one, has also been found to be an effective technique to help you sleep.

Neti Pots

I have just the thing for that cold … Neti Pots

Neti pot devotees are a dedicated bunch. After all, it takes a certain level of commitment to fall in love with a “nose bidet” that squirts salt water into your nostrils to wash out your nose and sinuses. Using neti pots began as part of the yogic and ayurvedic traditions. Among those who recommend using neti pots for colds, allergies, and sinus problems are Dr. Oz and Oprah. It is hard to imagine many other people with enough influence to get people to appear willingly on national television with water draining out of their nostrils. Their endorsements made neti pots a popular seller.

The principle of the neti pot is that you irrigate or wash out the nose with sterile salt water (also called saline). This can be done through the use of liquids (like the neti pot bidet) or through non–neti pot methods like drops or a nasal spray. Using salt water to wash out the nose is thought to help sinus conditions or colds by clearing out excess mucus, reducing congestion, and improving your ability to breathe. Salt water washes may help keep your cilia moving to clear mucus and junk out of your respiratory tract. Cilia are little hairlike protrusions on the inside of your respiratory tract that move back and forth to clear things out of your respiratory tract by sending mucus up and out. The other proposed benefits of the neti pot are that it clears out any remaining infectious material from the sinuses and reduces the cough you have from your mucus.

Scientists have tested neti pots for coughs and colds. There have been three good studies done to assess whether cleaning out the nose with salt water improves the symptoms of upper respiratory tract infections, such as nasal discharge, congestion, sneezing, or headache. In these studies, high-concentration or normal-concentration salt water washing is compared to options such as phenylephrine drops (a decongestant), to no treatment, or to usual management for cough and colds such as encouraging the patient to rest, drink fluids, and using whatever medicines they wanted, including anti-fever medicines, antihistamines, and decongestants. The studies of using neti pots for adults and children with colds did not show any significant difference in the symptoms people experienced based on whether they used neti pots. There was no difference overall in the symptom scores that people reported when using the neti pot or other nose-washing methods, and the time it took for cold symptoms to go away was no better. The news for the neti pot was not all bad, though. In one study, the nose washing did improve the respiratory symptoms reported on the first day that it was used, although it did not show any difference after three days of treatment. In another study, people who washed out their noses did not take as much time off work. For children, benefits for the internal nose-washing were not found, and, not surprisingly, children were less willing to use the nose bidet. In summary, neti pots and other ways to wash out the nose do not do much for colds. You might feel more willing to go back to work after using one, but they do not make a big difference over the course of a cold, and may not make any difference at all.

Even though the neti pot is not the solution for your cold, there are problems that the neti pot may actually help with. In a study using daily salt water nose-washing for adults with sinusitis, the patients who used the neti pots reported fewer sinus symptoms and used less antibiotics. One challenge with this study, though, is that the comparison group was not using a fake neti pot or some sort of placebo therapy. It was very easy for everyone to know whether they were using the nasal-washing or not, and that could bias how people think they are feeling or whether they want to use an antibiotic. In interviews of people who used nasal-washing, they reported feeling empowered by being able to do something about their sinus symptoms as well as feeling that the therapy improved their symptoms. How these beliefs alter the results that someone would report in a study will not be known unless we can create a study where people do not know whether they received a neti pot treatment or not.

While the neti pot is unlikely to make any difference for your cold, it is possible that you might sense an improvement in your symptoms if you use a neti pot for sinusitis or long-term sinus symptoms that go on for weeks or months. But if you are not excited about the idea of washing out your nose with salt water, you are probably not missing out on a whole lot.

Nosebleeds

Tilt your head back to stop a nosebleed

Nosebleeds are a pain (sometimes literally). They are inconvenient, messy, and sometimes embarrassing. A commonly given piece of advice is that to stop a nosebleed you should tilt your head back. This advice could not be more wrong.

Sometimes we wish we could just get you to stop what you are doing and seriously think about these myths. Why would tilting your head back help to stop a nosebleed? What effect could it possibly have on the clotting mechanism of the bleed? Does it apply pressure to the wound? Does it restrict blood flow to the lesion? What does it do?

We can think of one thing that tilting your head back might do. It would take the blood that might exit your nostrils and send it streaming down the back of your throat. Now this might seem like a good thing to people around you who are afraid of the sight of blood. It may seem like a good idea to your mother if you’re sitting on her clean white couch. And it may seem like a good idea to anyone else who doesn’t want to have to deal with your nosebleed.

But it’s a terrible idea for
you
. There is a reason that the natural inclination of the blood is to exit your body going forward. That’s the safest thing for it to do. Blood heading up your nose and down your throat is a serious choking hazard. It’s also possible it will make you vomit. Plus, you might keep bleeding for longer. None of those things is good for you.