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Homeopathy is based on a 300-year-old mistake and magnetic therapy is simply fraudulent. As for oxygen-fortified drinks ... Christopher Wanjek debunks some popular medical myths

Christopher Wanjek
Tuesday November 26, 2002
The Guardian

Ancient Egyptians believed the heart was the centre of thought and the brain cooled the body. The Romans reckoned a bad uterus caused hysteria. And you know about London's blood-letting days. Yet myths about the body and health linger on today, some astoundingly ludicrous but pervasive none the less.

Often it is said, for example, that we use just 10% of our brains. Magician Uri Geller readily spreads this myth as an explanation for why he can bend spoons; he claims to use more of his brain than the rest of us. Truth be told, we use 100% of our brains - even while watching a silly Uri Geller magic show. That 10% figure was invented in the 30s by ad men in America selling self-help pamphlets. "Scientists say you only use one-tenth of your brain," the ads said. "Wake up to your true potential."

In the 19th century, scientists did indeed determine that certain parts of the brain didn't seem to have any obvious function (such as moving a limb) when stimulated by an electrode. They called these regions "the silent cortex" and later learned that these regions were responsible for the very traits that make us human: language and abstract thought.

How can we be sure that Geller is not even 10% right about the brain? For one, commonsense: never has a doctor said, "You'll be fine.The bullet is lodged in the 90% part of the brain you don't use." Biologically, any part of the body will deteriorate without use. Legs shrivel in a cast, and neurons in the brain die as a result of diseases such as Alzheimer's and dementia. And if you want proof in pictures, modern scans all show that the entire brain is active.

Some body myths still show up in biology textbooks. The tongue is not mapped out to taste sweet, salty, bitter and sour in select locations. The tip of the tongue is said to be reserved for the sweet taste. Yet place salt on the tip of your tongue - or anywhere, for that matter - and you will taste it.

The tongue map developed around 1900 merely suggesting that certain regions might be more sensitive than others for certain types of tastes, which itself isn't so true either. A misinterpretation of the data over the years led people to think that taste buds only existed in delineated regions. French wine glass makers are still hooked on the idea.

Slightly lower in the body we come to the liver, which detoxifies poisons from food and medicine. A million-dollar industry has grown from the notion that the liver itself becomes toxic and must be cleaned, or banged out like a lint screen, with a vitamin and herb regimen. Not true. Aside from vitamin A, nothing ever accumulates in the liver. What the liver cannot detoxify, it allows to pass.

Alternative medicine thrives on these types of myths. Magnet therapy, with its claim that it manipulates blood flow, is just plain fraudulent. The therapy is based on the notion that the iron in our blood is magnetic. Makes sense, but it's wrong, because iron is bound to haemoglobin. If the blood were magnetic, then we would blow up when placed under the powerful magnets of an MRI machine. If you do notice redness under that magnetic bracelet you are wearing, that's not magnetism. You merely have a chunk of metal irritating your skin.

Homeopathy is based on a 300-year-old mistake. Homeopathy's foundation lies on the premises of "like cures like" and "the law of infinitesimals." Nappy rash, for example, is cured with a diluted solution of poison ivy. Homeopathy founders when it comes to dilution. A typical dilution level is times 30, which in homeopathy-speak means one-part medicine and 1030 part water. Such dilution is implausible, developed before the concept of Avogadro's number, which determines the number of molecules in a given solution. You would need to drink 8,000 gallons of water to get one molecule of medicine.

Other homeopathic cures are set at 100 to the power of 30. You would need an entire solar system worth of matter to mix with one molecule of medicine. At least homeopathy is safe because it is, indeed, just water.

On the topic of thirst, a new trend is oxygen-fortified drinks to replenish your body with oxygen. It shouldn't surprise you that breathing works better. Oxygen best enters the bloodstream through the lungs, not the stomach. You would need to drink about a litre of oxygenated water every 30 seconds to get a deep breath's worth of extra oxygen, and this assumes you don't pee.

Even breathing in pure oxygen won't help you catch your breath because haemoglobin (which carries oxygen in the blood) is nearly saturated with oxygen with every normal breath we take at sea level, where the air is about 18% oxygen.

Alternative medicine proponents have also latched on to the antioxidant fable, this notion that heroic antioxidant supplements fight sinister free radicals out to wreck havoc on the body. This is an oversimplification. Free radicals are molecules with an unpaired electron, making them highly reactive. Yes, they destroy cell walls and lead to disease. And yes, antioxidants neutralise free radicals. Yet free radicals are crucial for the body to make energy, a process that occurs in the cell's mitochondria. Also, free radicals, such as hydrogen peroxide, are a key component to the body's immune system. Too many antioxidants - that is, megadoses of supplements - disturb this natural process.

Indeed, antioxidants such has vitamin C and beta carotene have been shown to fuel cancer growth, and selenium can be toxic. Conversely, there is no evidence that high doses of antioxidants help the body in any way - except (a big maybe here) vitamin E.

The myth of brain cancer from mobile phones is steeped in society's irrational fear of radiation. For radiation to cause cancer, it must break chemical bonds in the body. Only certain types of radiation, called ionising radiation, can do this. Ultraviolet radiation, X-rays and gamma rays are the culprits. Visible light and radio waves are always safe.

Radiation travels as photons. Imagine a chemical bond as a window across the street. A high-energy X-ray photon is like a golf ball that smashes the window. Radio photons from mobiles, millions of times less energetic than X-rays, are like puffballs. You can throw as many radio puffballs as you want, you will never break that window. This is the essence of quantum mechanics.

If your ear feels warm after a cellphone conversation, remember that you are holding a machine with a battery pack against your head. If you get a headache, remember that talking on a mobile is much more annoying than talking on a traditional phone.

Vaccination also worries people today, particularly the MMR vaccine thought to be related to autism. Several major studies in America and England have found no association between the two. Autism merely appears at the same time in life that a child gets the MMR jab. The myth lives on, though, fuelled by a back-to-nature crowd who simply don't understand the importance of vaccines. We have a false sense of security: because our children are immunised, they do not contract measles, whooping cough, and other potentially deadly diseases. Those children not immunised are relatively safe because everyone around them is immunised. Drop immunisation, and we're right back to the 19th century.

The anti-vaccine crowd doesn't understand that 25,000 people will have died of measles alone in Afghanistan this year, according to World Health Organisation. That's a world without vaccines. Likewise, Britain, feeling confident, dropped the whooping cough vaccine in 1974, and by 1978 there was an epidemic of 100,000 cases, with 36 deaths.

The vaccine worry highlights the core myths associated with alternative medicine. First, the ancient "natural" world was somehow a better place, less polluted and with less stress. Second, ancient peoples knew how to care for themselves with natural remedies that "restore balance" by channelling unseen energy forces in the universe. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Life was much harder as little as 100 years ago. Children died. Disease wiped out entire cities. For most of humanity, indoor air was filled with soot and faeces. Families constantly stressed over where the next meal would come from. No herbal medicine or incantation routinely worked to cure disease. Few lived past the age of 50, no matter if they practiced yoga and thought happy thoughts, as Deepak Chopra and Andrew Weil teach us.

Surprisingly, many in this modern world subscribe to the idea that disease is not caused by pathogens but rather an "unbalance" or "negative energy". They take untested herbs, much like medieval Europeans, to restore this balance. Or they practice qigong to move so-called qi (chi) energy through the body to initiate some mystic healing practice.

Only people in the wealthiest of nations are subscribing to ancient practices, often banned in developing countries. We seem to be so content, so caught up with myths, that we have forgotten how the advances of real science through the 20th century - the germ theory of disease, for one - have made life that much more pleasant.

· Christopher Wanjek's book, Bad Medicine, is published by John Wiley & Sons, priced £11.50. To order a copy phone: 0800 243407.