Count on Jane E. Brody to set the record straight.  Some of these I’ve heard before but some I just didn’t believe it until the eminent Ms. Brody declared it true.  Now I know that…

  1. You do NOT have to drink eight glasses of water a day.  Thank God, because I have to go to the bathroom often enough as it is!
  2. Poison Ivy is not contagious.  I wish I knew this when my son had this heinous rash recently and I refused to hug him.  Bad Mommy Moment.
  3. You shouldn’t use cotton swabs to clean your ears.  OK, but then how do I clean them?  Does anyone know a good professional ear cleaner?
  4. It’s OK to swim after eating.  That implies I dare expose my swim-suited body after eating.  It’s not stomach cramps that scares me.
  5. Shaving hair doesn’t make it grow back faster or coarser.  Fearing coarse hair never stopped me shaving, it was coarse enough to begin with.
  6. Colon cleansing does NOT wash out poisons.  Colon cleansing procedures and diets are so popular these days (Et tu, Oprah?) I was considering one a while back but I got the stomach flu instead.  It cleansed everything squeaky clean!
  7. You don’t have to think ‘natural’ has it over man-made.  The label “Natural” can be today’s “Snake Oil” so we need to be careful.
  8. Take pain killers before the pain is unbearable.  We can be so pill averse we wait until the pain is beyond the reach of medication and then say the medication doesn’t work.  My doctor taught me that if I took half the dose before the pain got bad even over the counter Tylenol worked just fine.

Read the whole article:
Health ‘Facts’ You Only Thought You Knew.