The annals of medical history are strewn with wrongheaded theories, misbegotten paradigms and woefully ill-conceived treatments.
U.S. physicians no longer prescribe heroin to children afflicted by coughs – common practice in 1912. Lobotomies, all the rage into the 1950s, too, are passé.
“There have been a lot of false fads in medicine, and they’ve been very harmful,” said Durango gynecologist Dr. Richard Grossman.
He would know. A Lousiana clinic entrusted with his sister’s care tried to solve her asthma with arsenic.
“It obviously didn’t help her, and it may have hurt her,” he said.
Science has progressed, correcting many of its own medical errors along the way. We laymen have often failed to keep pace. By the mid-20th century, major medical journals no longer pathologized sexuality in children. In 2014, it is an empirically established fact that masturbation neither induces blindess nor causes any human hairs to rioutously grow. Yet, that fact is lost even on childhoods unfolding today, as pernicious old fictions find dark, unaccountable places to thrive.
If anything, the chasm between laymen’s and doctors’ understanding of medicine is widening. Scientists’ insights into the human brain, genome and psychology become more staggering by the day. Meanwhile, regular folks pore over WebMD.com, defensive and desperate.
“There are lots of old, and new, wives’ tales about health care. People do a lot of things that good experiments and scientific data prove are ineffective,” Grossman said.
In just the last five years, numerous medical falsehoods have enjoyed currency in mainstream thinking. A 2014 survey published in the JAMA Internal Medicine found that fully half of Americans believe in at least one health-related conspiracy, including the thoroughly debunked beliefs: such as vaccines cause autism, cellphones cause brain cancer and that government’s pump fluoride into public water to further chemical companies’ plot.
Durango residents are no different, bringing drastic misimpressions of medicine into local doctors’ office and emergency rooms. Here’s what local doctors most want their patients, past and future, to know:
Vaccines don’t cause autism
Nearly every doctor interviewed for this article said the No. 1 myth they’d like to see dispelled is that vaccines cause autism.
“It’s been so thoroughly debunked,” said Dr. Kicki Searfus, of Mountain View Family Medical TLC. “The guy (Andrew Wakefield, a British researcher) who did that initial study a million years ago has been thoroughly discredited. He falsified his data. Meanwhile, generations of parents decided not to immunize their children, and we’re seeing the re-emergence of diseases like polio and measles that we’d thought were long done.”
The latest dieting book is probably wrong
For decades, popular science about dieting has been in a state of permanent revolution. In the 1990s, weight-loss gurus insisted low-fat, low-calorie diets were the only way to get slim. The frenzy for frozen yogurt ended as quickly as it began, giving way to a succession of equally dubious diet manias - including Atkins, South Beach, 4 Hour Body, Paleo, Zone, Master Cleanse and macrobiotics.
“Not too long ago, it was the blood-type diet,” Grossman said. “Now, it’s people who don’t have Celiac disease stopping eaten fruits and gluten.”
Dr. Jack McManus, who works in the emergency room at Mercy Regional Medical Center, said there’s almost no science to back up any of these dogmas. He said this is in part because there’s still no seminal scientific study on dieting: Over the long term, no team of researchers has managed to follow a large enough group of subjects, adhering to a strict enough diet – an academic feat, he noted, that would also require considerable funding.
McManus said in the absence of definitive science, individuals would be better off ignoring the totalitarian, pseudoscientific doctrines flogged by dieting profiteers, and instead stick to what everyone more or less knows instinctually: “People know what junk food is.”
“It’s still not exactly clear what the perfect human diet is,” he said. “But people have to understand that food is also medicine. Eating healthy food and spurning junk food – that’s the easiest way to turn younger next year.”
Antibiotics don’t treat viruses
Antibiotics treat bacterial infections, not viral infections. But many people diagnosed with a virus still want antibiotics.
“We’ve been battling this for years,” Searfus said. “A patient comes in with a nasty virus and thinks, ‘I want something. I want to be done with this, I want to treat it.’ That’s understandable. But antibiotics will do nothing to treat a virus. But because doctors – for years and years and years – were writing millions upon millions of antibiotic prescriptions, we bred these vicious strains of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics. Now, people who do have bacterial infections can’t be adequately treated,” she said.
Overdosing on ibuprofen is a problem
Adults should take ibuprofen no more than three times a day in 400 to 600 milligram doses. McManus said “higher doses than that cause side effects, like intestinal bleeding. If you’re someone with rheumatism, 800 milligrams may be the appropriate dose. But most people overdo it, causing a lot of problems. In the ER, they’ll end up seeing a gastroenterologist or even a nephrologist because they took too much ibuprofen.
Cold doesn’t cause pneumonia
Being exposed to cold temperatures does not give you pneumonia. You can get hypothermia from cold, but not pneumonia.
Don’t self-diagnose online
“People do have a lot more exposure to good information thanks to the Internet. But they also have access to extraordinarily misleading information on the Internet,” McManus said.
He said it was vital that patients turn to reputable websites like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as the Mayo Clinic to get their information.
Not everything causes cancer
“If you want to find a website that tells you something causes cancer, you’re going to find it,” McManus said.
You probably don’t have that horrible disease in the news
McManus said people sometimes showed up in the ER convinced they’ve fallen victim to the latest deadly pandemic.
“If something’s in the news quite a bit,” he said, “people occasionally get concerned that they have that certain disease. Like bird flu a couple of years ago.”
McManus said in rural Colorado, the chances of being exposed to Ebola, H1N1, foot-and-mouth disease or MERS – the lethal disease du jour – are slim.
“With many of these diseases – MERS for instance – there really is a very clear criteria. I moved to Durango from New York City 14 years ago. In a New York hospital, one of the first questions we’d ask if someone showed up with pneumonia-like symptoms during an outbreak like this is, ‘Have you recently been to the Middle East? Are you an international traveler?’”
He said Durangoans inclined to hypochondria can relax for now.
“If you answered no to either of those questions, you almost certainly don’t have MERS, though we’d treat you as if you had the disease until we excluded that possibility,” he said. “But it would be a very rare occurrence for someplace without an international airport.”
cmcallister@durangoherald.com
