Nothing Special About Your Head…!
Six Homespun Medical Myths Debunked
Drs. Vreeman and Carroll generated a list of six popular beliefs associated with either winter or the holiday season and searched the medical literature for evidence one way or another.
It turns out that:
* Holiday sweets don’t make the kids more hyperactive.
* Suicides don’t go up over the holidays.
* Poinsettias aren’t poisonous.
* Avoiding eating at night won’t keep the pounds off.
* The only way to cure a hangover is not to get one in the first place.Oh, and the hat thing. The roots of the myth probably lie in military tests, in which volunteers were dressed in arctic survival suits but no hats. When researchers measured heat loss, most of it — for obvious reasons — was from the unprotected head.
But if the myth was true, the researchers said, “humans would be just as cold if they went without trousers as if they went without a hat.”
