On February 14th, the state of Florida was victim to a tragic shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. The shooter, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, killed 17 people and injured 14, CNN reports. The following Thursday, the Florida gunman began his journey through the criminal justice system.
Cruz was officially charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder. He was also not awarded any bail by the judge as well. After the hearing, Cruz’s defense attorney, Melisa McNeil, told reporters that Cruz feels sad, remorseful and mournful, according to theDaily Mail.
McNeil and Gordon Weekes, another member of Cruz’s defense team, confirm that Cruz suffers from depression, autism, and has dealt with other psychological issues. Weekes adds that Cruz is deeply troubled and believes that the teenager has suffered significant trauma that comes from the loss of his mother.
This Is What We Know About Nikolas Cruz: According to the Anti-Defamation League, Cruz hurled slurs at Muslims and black people and he had certain ties to white supremacists. They also report that Cruz said that he wanted to shoot people with his AR-15, the gun that was used in the shooting. CNN states that there were posts under videos on Youtube and other sites by someone that used the name Nikolas Cruz that included threatening comments. Some of the comments included “I wanna shoot people with my AR-15” and “I wanna die Fighting killing s**t ton of people.”
In September of 2017, a video blogger, Ben Bennight, apparently warned the FBI about a possible shooting threat from one of the Youtube users with the same name as Cruz. One FBI agent confirms that a field officer in Jackson, Mississippi interviewed the person who gave the tip. Unfortunately, there was no additional information found on the person who posted the threatening comment.
Daily Mail
This Is What We Know About the Shooting: CNN reports that an Uber driver dropped Cruz at the school at 2:19 p.m. and he proceeded to walk through the east stairwell of the school at 2:21 p.m. According to the local law enforcement timeline, Cruz was carrying his rifle in a black case. Cruz activated the fire alarm at some point in order to get everyone out of the classrooms. Some students were confused when they heard the fire alarm because the school had already done a fire drill earlier that day. Cruz started roaming the halls on the first floor and targeted students who were huddled up in classrooms before he went to the second floor. Some students were texting goodbye to loved ones while this was happening. Others were posting images on social media. One student, Kelsey Friend, said that she heard her teacher get shot in the doorway while she and the rest of her classmates hid near the teacher’s desk.
News.Sky.com
After Cruz was finished, he dropped his rifle and backpack on the third floor of the school and ran out of the building to blend in with the evacuating crowd. According to the timeline, Cruz went to a Subway sandwich store and bought a drink before he went to McDonald’s and sat down for a few minutes. Cruz was identified thanks to school security videos by investigators and a Coral Springs officer detained Cruz when he saw him walking along the side of a road.
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Gun Control Debate: According to Senator Chris Murphy, Congress bears the responsibility for the epidemic of mass slaughters in the United States. He says that it’s not a coincidence that these shootings keep happening, it’s because of Congress’ inaction. Murphy, who is Connecticut Democrat, has been a supporter of gun control legislation for years. He represented the state when the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting occurred in 2012, killing 20 children. This is not the first time Murphy has criticized fellow members of Congress before, he also did so when the biggest mass shooting in modern American history occurred in Las Vegas in October 2017.
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Unfortunately, not everyone agrees with the timing of Murphy’s comments. House Speaker Paul Ryan argues that this is not the right time to have a political battle regarding gun laws. He told reporters at a news conference at the Capitol that everyone needs to take a step back from fighting each other and just try to pull together as a country. Ryan also reminded the reporters that the Republican-controlled House passed a bill that helps fill the holes in the Criminal Background Check System. The bill ensures that there will be more distinct reporting from states and the military of people with domestic convictions, according to CNN.
CNStock/shutterstock.com
More Background On Nikolas Cruz: Cruz was an adopted child, and his adopted mother, Lynda Cruz, passed away in November 2017. Kimberly and James Snead took Cruz into their home and let him stay there for three months before this shooting occurred. According to Broward County Public Schools Superintendent Robert Runcie, Cruz was suspended from the school he opened fire on because of disciplinary problems. He didn’t give specifics. According to CNN, Broward Sheriff’s deputies were called to the Cruz family home a total of 39 times since 2010. Some of the calls were for a mentally ill person, child/elderly abuse, domestic disturbance and a missing person.
Sun Sentinel
Beam Furr, who is the Broward County Mayor, says that Cruz was getting treatment at a mental health clinic for a long time, but he had not been back to the clinic in over a year, according to Daily Mail.
Wonders of the human brain, with all its intelligent and emotional powers, have always attracted the brightest of humans. Many of the psychologists and neurologists have made great efforts to understand the human brain in order to understand and/or control human behavior. With the evolution of civilization, the extent at which the scientists go in their experiments, have now become very human. However, many of the experiments still fall under the completely inhumane, unethical, and immoral area. We’ve compiled a list of the 10 most bizarre, unethical, and inhumane psychological experiment that went horribly wrong and ended up with disastrous results.
1. Tony LaMadrid – This University of California study asked the participants who were schizophrenics to stop taking medicine. The result of the program was devastating when almost all the participant patients relapsed into the mental illness and one participant committed suicide.
Tony LaMadrid, a 23-year-old male with a history of depression and schizophrenia, was being treated for the same at the UCLA Medical Center Psychiatric Department from 1985 to 1989. During that time, he was both a patient and an active participant in a psychiatric study approved by the university. This study, “Developmental Processes in Schizophrenic Disorders,” was directed by psychologist Keith H. Nuechterlein with psychiatrist Michael Gitlin, and its aim was to gather data on the how and why of schizophrenic relapses. This experiment required patients to get off the medicines to evaluate effects of the medicine on the patients, on the non-patients, and on the way the brain works. The experiment vaguely listed the potential negative side effects of the removal of medicine by mentioning that the patient’s condition may improve, worsen, or remain unchanged. However, the exact nature of the potential relapse was unspecified.
The patients undergoing the treatment and consequent experiment responded very negatively to the experiment. The result of the experiment was disastrous when more than 90% of the patients experienced very severe relapses over the course of the experiment. The experiment was also contaminated by many of the patients who resented being on medication often lying about the effects of the experiment on them. The experimenters never reinstated the medication nor did they delve deeper into the lives of the victims for further investigation. About six years into the experiment, Tony committed suicide by jumping off a building.(source)
2. Project QKHILLTOP – Another CIA project from the 50s that aimed to study Chinese brainwashing techniques which they then used to develop new methods of interrogation. The participants were subjected to “chemical, biological, and radiological” means for mind control in addition to imprisonment, deprivation, humiliation, torture, brainwashing, and hypnoses during the project.
In 1954, the CIA initiated a project named QKHILLTOP aimed to study Chinese brainwashing techniques and to develop effective methods of interrogation. Most of these studies were performed by the Cornell University Medical School’s human ecology study programs under the supervision of the director Dr. Harold Wolff. Dr. Wolff asked the CIA to provide him any information they could find regarding threats, coercion, imprisonment, deprivation, humiliation, torture, “brainwashing,” “black psychiatry,” and hypnosis, or any combination of these, with or without chemical agents. The research team would then assemble, collate, analyze, and assimilate this information and then undertake experimental investigations designed to develop new techniques of offensive/defensive intelligence use. He also asked for “suitable subjects” (Human beings) on whom his team could try this information and techniques. These techniques often involved secret drugs and various brain-damaging procedures. And to conduct these experiments, in addition to the subjects, he also asked for a proper place.
The results were so devastating that one author calls the CIA researchers “a bunch of bumbling sci-fi buffoons,” rather than a rational group of men who had run torture laboratories and medical experiments in major US universities. These experiments which involved torture, rape, and psychological abuse of adults and young children resulted in many of these participants becoming permanently insane.(source)
3. Emma Eckstein and Sigmund Freud – German doctor Freud treated patient Emma for hysteria and excessive masturbation even though Emma asked for help with vague symptoms like stomach ailments and mild depression. He performed a radical surgery on Emma with just a local anesthetic and cocaine. When the surgery turned out to be disastrous, Freud fled from the remedial surgery in horror.
At the age of 27, Emma Eckstein went to Dr. Sigmund Freud for stomach ailments and slight depression. Freud diagnosed Emma as suffering from hysteria and believed that she masturbated to excess. Since masturbation was considered as a dangerous mental illness in those days, Freud started a three-year-long psychoanalysis treatment of Emma.
Even though Emma proved to be a leading factor in major theories of Freud, including “Psychopathology,” “theory of deferred action,” and “the wish theory of psychosis and dreams,” it was Freud’s obsession with operating on Emma’s nose and sinuses to treat nasal reflex neurosis was what resulted in disaster. Since Freud believed that Emma’s habitual masturbation caused severe leg pain, and since he believed that the tissue of the nose and genitalia were linked, it can be cured by removing the middle turbinate. Freud performed a disturbing experimental surgery with Dr. Wilhelm Fliess on Emma in which she was anesthetized with only a local anesthetic and cocaine before the inside of her nose was cauterized. The surgery proved to be a disaster resulting in profuse, recurrent nasal bleeding. Freud left a half-meter of gauze in Emma’s nasal cavity and the procedure of removing that gauze left Emma permanently disfigured. During this disastrous operation, Freud fled from the remedial surgery in horror.
Freud later concluded that Emma’s post-operative hemorrhages were hysterical “wish-bleedings” linked to “an old wish to be loved in her illness” and triggered as a means of “re-arousing [Freud’s] affection.” However, Emma continued her analysis with Freud until she was restored to full mobility and went on to practice psychoanalysis herself.(source)
4. Electroshock Therapy on Children – Dr. Lauretta Bender of New York’s Creedmoor Hospital employed electroconvulsive therapy for children with social issues. In this treatment which was performed on more than 100 children, they administered electroshock therapy to the patients every day for a total of twenty treatments. The children ended up being more anxious and were also observed to develop visual body distortion as the result of the test.
In the ’50s and ’60s, the head of children’s psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, Lauretta Bender, started conducting extensive research on autism. She believed that autism is a type of schizophrenia and was often one of the first signs. For further research, she started experiments on the autistic kids where she administered electroconvulsive therapy to autistic patients. Bender’s methods included interviewing and analyzing a sensitive child in front of a large group, then applying a gentle amount of pressure to the child’s head. Supposedly, any child who moved with the pressure was showing early signs of schizophrenia. The experiments also included insulin-shock therapy where they gave the kids overdoses of insulin that put them into a short-term coma. She also gave the kid patients antipsychotic drugs like Thorazine. She also tried giving autistic kids LSD every day for nine months or more, but decided they were becoming “more anxious.” By the time this therapy was stopped, Bender administered electroconvulsive therapy to at least 100 children ranging in age from three years old to 12 years, with some reports indicating the total may be twice that number.
The results of these experiments were as shocking as the therapy itself. The condition of the children only worsened after the therapy. One six-year-old child went from being a shy, withdrawn child to acting increasingly aggressive and violent. A seven-year-old girl after five electroshock sessions became nearly catatonic. One of the Bender’s patients who became overly aggressive after about 20 such treatments was convicted for multiple murders later in adult life. Many other patients in their adulthood were reportedly in and of trouble and prison for a battery of petty and violent crimes. Two psychologists who conducted a study on the 50 of Bender’s young electroshock patients, concluded that nearly all patients were worse off after the “therapy” and some had become suicidal after the treatment.(source)
5. Sexual Reassignment – David Reimer, a Canadian boy, became the victim of a circumcision process accident when he was only seven months old in which his penis was destroyed. Dr. John Money persuaded the baby’s parents that sex reassignment surgery would be in Reimer’s best interest. The end result of the project was that in addition to his difficult lifelong relationship with his parents, other psychological issues, and unemployment, David took his own life by shooting himself.
In 1965, David (who was originally named Bruce) and Brian, two identical twin brothers, were born in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Six months later, the boys were diagnosed with phimosis. When they were referred for circumcision at the age of seven months in 1966, a urologist performed the operation on Bruce using the unconventional cauterization method. The procedure failed burning Bruce’s penis beyond repair. Doctors then chose not to operate on the twin Brian who was lucky enough to have his phimosis cleared later without surgery.
Parents who were concerned about Bruce’s future happiness and sexual function without a penis took him to Dr. John Money at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in 1967. Money was a psychologist and a pioneer in the field of sexual development and gender identity. He was the proponent of the “theory of gender neutrality”- that gender identity developed primarily as a result of social learning from childhood and that it could be changed with appropriate behavioral interventions.
Money and team persuaded Bruce’s parents that “sex reassignment surgery” would be in his best interest. At the age of 22 months, Bruce underwent a bilateral orchiectomy in which his testicles were surgically removed and a rudimentary vulva was fashioned. Bruce was reassigned to be raised as a female and was given the name Brenda. Money provided psychological support for the reassignment and continued to see him for about a decade for the consultation and to assess the outcome.
The results, according to Money himself, were very positive, however, during the once-a-year visit to Money, Bruce’s parents often lied about the success of the procedure and Bruce had experienced the visits to Baltimore as traumatic rather than therapeutic.
Bruce didn’t identify as a girl. He was ostracized and bullied by peers. He did not feel like a female even with the fancy dresses and female hormones. By the age of 13, Bruce became suicidal and threaten to take his own life if he was made to see Money again. On May 4, 2004, Bruce drove to a grocery store’s parking lot in his hometown of Winnipeg and took his own life by shooting himself in the head with a sawed-off shotgun at the age of 38 years.(source)
6. Project Artichoke – the CIA conducted a series of mind control projects using various methods and substances such as hypnosis, LSD, and total isolation as a form of physiological harassment for special interrogations on human subjects. The operation resulted in subjects left with fogged, faulty, and vague memories and amnesia.
In 1951, the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence initiated a project named “Artichoke” aimed at controlling minds. This project was supervised by an agent from the CIA research staff, a former army brigadier general, Paul F. Gaynor, and it gathered information from the intelligence divisions of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and FBI. The project also included the scope of the question, “Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self-preservation?”
The experiments also carried out in-house and overseas experiments using LSD in addition to hypnosis and total isolation to harass subjects psychologically and for interrogation techniques on human subjects. The project also studied effects of forced morphine addiction, drug withdrawal, and the use of chemicals to incite amnesia on the unwilling human subjects. For the project participants or subjects, the CIA chose weaker members of the human race which according to them were homosexuals, racial minorities, and military prisoners. For the locations, they chose isolated places in Japan, Europe, Asia, and the Philippines.
Apart from the obvious inhumane results of the projects where all the participants became the victims of PTSD and amnesia, the collateral damage was even more horrible. The outbreak of dengue in the Key West city of Florida in 2010 where about 10 percent, or 1,000 people, of the coastal town’s population, were infected with the dengue fever virus was attributed to the usage of virus for experiments in this project. When Project Artichoke included viruses in their experiments, the official CIA document read, “Not all viruses have to be lethal…the objective includes those that act as short-term and long-term incapacitating agents.” Many CIA documents, as well as the findings of a congressional committee in 1975, revealed that three sites in Florida – Key West, Panama City, and Avon Park and two other locations were used by the CIA for experiments with mosquito-borne dengue fever and other biological substances.(1, 2)
7. Operation Midnight Climax – Part of a larger CIA-sponsored mind control project, this project aimed at luring subjects to the safe houses and secretly give them LSD and other mind-altering substances. The project resulted in the participants having psychotic public outburst episodes on numerous occasion.
In the 1950s, the CIA as a part of Operation Midnight Climax, set up safe houses in San Francisco, Marin, and New York City. These safe houses acted as brothels to obtain a selection of men who would be too embarrassed to talk about the events. The CIA instructed the prostitutes who were on the CIA payroll to lure clients back to the safe houses where they were secretly infused with a wide range of substances, including LSD, and were monitored behind one-way glass. These lured civilians were also subject to the various studies that included extensive research into sexual blackmail, surveillance technology, and the possible use of mind-altering drugs in field operations. Apart from these totally illegal experiments, subjects were blackmailed into keeping the experiments a secret by threatening to extend their ‘’trips’’ indefinitely.
The operation soon expanded and CIA operatives began drugging people in restaurants, bars, and beaches. Not only civilians, but CIA employees, U.S. military personnel, and agents suspected of working for the other side in the Cold War were also drugged and became unwilling participants in this operation. The outcome of the project was horrible. There are documented instances of people having long-term debilitation. There are also reports of several deaths resulting from this project. Other adverse reactions included an instance where an operative who unwillingly received the drug in his morning coffee became psychotic and ran across Washington, seeing a monster in every car that passed him. Another psychotic outburst included Dr. Frank Olson who was an Army scientist and never took LSD or any mind-altering drug, went into deep depression after he was surprisingly and unwillingly was drugged with LSD, and when the effects of LSD, commonly called as “trip,” started. He later fell from a thirteen story window.(source)
8. Stanford Prison Experiment – the US Navy-funded Stanford University prison experiment attempted investigating the psychological effects of perceived power focusing on the power struggle between prisoners and prison officers. The experiment was ended abruptly after six days when some participants developed their roles as the officers, enforced authoritarian measures, and ultimately subjected some prisoners to psychological torture.
On August 14, 1971, Sandford University professor Dr. Philip Zimbardo started an experiment in an attempt to test the hypothesis that the inherent personality traits of prisoners and guards are the chief cause of abusive behavior in prison. He recruited 24 of the most psychologically stable and healthy male student participants by informing them that they would be in a two-week prison simulation. The US Office of Naval Research funded this research as an investigation into the cause of difficulties between guards and prisoners in the US Navy and US Marine Corps.
Zimbardo provided wooden batons to them and asked them to not physically harm the prisoners or withhold food or drinks. He, however, asked the guards to apply psychological pressure by, “creating in the prisoners the feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they’ll have no privacy … We’re going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general, what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation, we’ll have all the power and they’ll have none.” Prisoners were “arrested” at their homes and “charged” with armed robbery. The local Palo Alto police department assisted Zimbardo with the arrests and conducted full booking procedures on the prisoners, which included fingerprinting and taking mug shots. They also transported the prisoners to the mock prison from the police station, where they were strip-searched and given their new identities.
The horrible results started showing from the second day onward. A few prisoners started refusing to follow guards’ instructions and one guard attacked prisoners with a fire extinguisher. Within 36 hours, one prisoner started acting crazy and started screaming, cursing, and going into a rage. It took the supervising team a while to realize the prisoner was really suffering psychologically. As time passed, the guards started harassing prisoners mentally and physically. The experiment was halted after only six days when several guards became increasingly cruel, and approximately one-third of the guards exhibited genuine sadistic tendencies. Most of the guards were upset when the experiment was halted after only six days.(source)
9. Milgram Experiment – This Yale University psychology experiment measured the willingness of a test subject to obey an authority figure. In the experiment, they separated two participants into two rooms where they could hear but not see each other. Then they asked the test subject to ask questions to the other and for each wrong answer, they would be punished with an electric shock. Contradictory to the researchers’ expectations, the experiment found that a very high proportion of people were prepared to obey, albeit unwillingly, even if apparently causing serious injury and distress.
Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University in 1961, began a series of social psychological experiments to measure the willingness of the study participants, men from a diverse range of occupations with varying level of education, to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. The experiment started three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram developed this study to answer the hot topic question of the time: “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” This experiment was repeated many times over the years with consistent results around the globe.
In the experiment, they assigned roles of a teacher and a learner to the two participants. They chose an actor for the role of the learner and the test subject for the role of teacher. However, they kept it secret to the subject that the actor was also a teacher. They instead give the impression that the actor is. Milgram then placed both in an adjacent room and strapped the actor into an electric chair. Milgram also told the subject that the learner had a heart condition. They also gave the subject a sample electric shock to experience the pain the learner would experience. They gave the teacher a list of word pairs to teach the learner. The teacher would then read the first word of each pair and give the learner four option to choose the correct answer from. For every wrong answer, the teacher was to administer an electric shock to the learner with the voltage increasing in 15-volt increments for each wrong answer.
Some subjects stopped administrating electric shock to the learner after reaching 135 volts, however, most continued when they were assured that they would not be held responsible. Some, upon hearing the pain induced screams of the learners, started showing extreme stress signs such as nervous laughing. In the first set of experiments, 65 percent of experiment participants administered the experiment’s final massive 450-volt shock. In addition to the literal electric shock, the participants suffered extreme emotional stress and inflicted insights.(source)
10. Monster Study – This University of Iowa experiment involved orphan children from Davenport, Iowa. The supervisor divided these children into two groups and gave each group separate speech therapy. One group received positive and other received negatively. This study resulted in the children suffering lifelong negative psychological effects.
In 1939, Wendell Johnson, a University of Iowa professor with the help of his graduate student Mary Tudor, conducted an experiment involving 22 orphan children from Davenport, Iowa. They selected 22 subjects from a veterans’ orphanage in Iowa. They didn’t inform the intent of the research to the children and led them to believe that they were receiving speech therapy. Out of the 22 students, 10 students were stutterers, and the goal of the experiments was to try to induce stuttering in healthy children and to see whether telling stutterers that their speech was fine would produce a change.
This experiment created negative psychological effects on the orphans who were part of the negative therapy. Some of them retained speech problems for the rest of their lives. The experiment was called “Monster Study” as some of the Johnson peers were horrified that he would experiment on orphans to confirm a hypothesis. Johnson never published the results of the experiments in any peer-reviewed journals and Tudor’s thesis is the only official record of the details of the experiment. The experiment was kept hidden as it was feared to harm Johnson’s reputation in the wake of human experiments conducted by the Nazis during World War II.(source)
Urban medical myths and old wives’ tales have been under the microscope for a long time now. But there are some myths that never leave no matter how many times they have been debunked. Myths related to medical or health are often repeated as facts. People just do not wish to take the risks they imply. A simple, diligent Google can easily reveal the truth behind these fallacies. From drinking eight glasses of water a day to staying awake during a concussion, we bring you 10 such medical myths that are still widely believed.
Myth #1
People should drink at least eight glasses of water a day.
Reality: There is no formal recommendation on how much water an average human requires. It varies depending on lifestyle, place of residence, and health condition.
The need to drink at least eight glasses of water a day is one of the most widely accepted myths. The origin of this myth can be found in a 1945 recommendation by the Food and Nutrition Board. The recommendation stated: “A suitable allowance of water for adults is 2.5 liters daily in most instances. An ordinary standard for diverse persons is one milliliter for each calorie of food. Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods.” The last two crucial sentences are generally ignored which led to the origin of this myth.
According to Dr. Aaron E. Carroll, author of Don’t Swallow Your Gum!: Myths, Half-Truths, and Outright Lies About Your Body and Health, water is not the only source of hydration. Moreover, the amount of water your body needs to intake depends on numerous other factors. Some of these factors include how active your lifestyle is, where you reside, and the type of food you eat daily. Also, there is no scientific evidence that suggests that drinking more water has numerous health benefits. Instead, excess water can drop the level of sodium in the blood causing water intoxication (also known as hyponatremia).(source)
Myth #2
Hair and fingernails continue to grow after death.
Reality: Dehydration of the body after death and drying gives an illusion that the hair and fingernails might still be growing.
According to expert forensic anthropologist William Maples, it is a myth that the nails and hair of a person continue to grow after death. For fingernails to grow, your body needs to produce new cells, and this can’t happen after your heart stops. There is no glucose production after you die. The same goes for hair.
But there is a biological basis for such observations. What happens is that the skin around the nails retracts as it becomes dehydrated. This makes the nails appear longer than before. When preparing a body, funeral directors sometimes moisturize the fingertips to counteract this illusion.
The skin on a dead man’s chin also dries out. It pulls back towards the skull as it happens. This leads to the appearance of short, stiff hairs on a man’s face similar to when he has not shaved for a while. Also, goosebumps caused by the contraction of the hair muscles adds to this effect.(source)
Myth #3
Shaving hair causes it to grow back faster, darker, or coarser.
Reality: Shaving does not play any part in affecting the rate or type of hair growth.
Strong scientific evidence disproves this myth. “People are just not very good observers, but there’s just no science behind hair growing back thicker,” says Amy McMichael, chair of the Department of Dermatology at Wake Forest Baptist Health.
In 1928, four men agreed to be a part of a study to prove or disprove this myth. For the study, the men shaved off a portion of their faces in one downward stroke. They used the same brand of shaving soap, razors, and same water at the same temperature. The researchers then collected the cut-off hairs to compare them after each measuring. They arrived at the conclusion that there is no evidence that shaving accelerates the rate of beard growth. A similar study conducted in 1970 produced the exact same results.
Shaving removes the dead portion of hair, not the living section lying below the skin’s surface. Hence, it is quite unlikely to affect the type or rate of growth.(source)
Myth #4
Pregnancies from sex between first cousins carry a serious risk of birth defects.
Image credit: Pixabay
Reality: The risk is 5–6%, similar to that of a 40-year-old woman’s pregnancy.
The Journal of Genetic Counseling published a related study in 2002. The study determined that the risk of serious genetic defects, like cystic fibrosis and spina bifida in children of first cousins, indeed exists. But it is rather small and just 1.7 to 2.8 percentage points higher than for children of unrelated parents who face a 3 to 4 percent risk. This is almost equal to children of women giving birth in their early 40s.
There have been more studies that suggest that the risks are even lower. In 2009, Alan Bittles, a researcher at the Centre for Comparative Genomics at Murdoch University in Australia and one of the authors of the 2002 study (mentioned earlier), published a paper. They stated that the mortality rate of children of first cousins was closer to 3.5 percentage points higher than children of unrelated parents, as opposed to 4.4 percentage points higher which was mentioned in the previous 2002 study.(1,2,3)
Myth #5
Female virgins have a hymen covering their vagina which gets popped the first time they have sex.
Reality: Virginal hymens that can “break” or “pop” during first sex don’t exist.
In many cultures, shortly after weddings, new husbands are expected to produce bloody sheets to prove that their brides are virgins. This is a ridiculous tradition that is prevalent across the globe even today.
It is a fact that tissue indeed exists down there, but the notion that it’s a uniform piece of the female anatomy that must, at some point “break” is just plain wrong. Female babies are born with membranes that surround their vaginal openings. Newborns’ hymens tend to be prominent and thick. But with age, most of the tissue thins out and the opening widens. Most hymenal tissue wears away because of walking, athletics, and self-exploration with only bits remaining around the vaginal opening.
Then why the discomfort and bleeding? Anna Knöfel from the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education points out that rushed, non-sensual, and poorly lubricated intercourse sometimes scrapes sensitive vaginal tissue that causes the pain and the bleeding.(1,2)
Myth #6
You should tilt your head back when you have a bloody nose.
Reality: Tilting your head back during a nosebleed causes the blood to trickle down the throat, sinuses. or the airways which can lead to gagging or choking.
This is one of the most common myths that we all must have experienced at some point. Dr. Diane Heatley, associate professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health says that the old remedy of tilting back the head doesn’t actually work and can even be fatal. Holding back the head can cause the blood to flow down the throat and cause choking. If enough blood trickles down into the stomach, its lining can get irritated and induce nausea and vomiting.
Nosebleeds usually start in blood vessels in the front of the nose. The person suffering a nosebleed should sit up and lean forward. This will make blood exit the front of the nose. Then gentle pressure should be applied on the nostrils until normal clotting starts.(1,2)
Myth #7
The tongue is mapped into four specific areas — sweet, sour, salty and bitter.
Reality: The entire tongue can sense these tastes more or less equally.
It’s time to change the tongue diagram that has been part of all science school books. Our tongue is not divided into four different regions for four different tastes. One of the first breakthroughs in taste bud research occurred in 1974 when researchers realized that the tongue map was just a century-old misunderstanding that no one challenged.
In 2006, scientists identified a protein that helps in detecting sour taste on the tongue. The protein works as a receptor cell that helps in identifying the taste. By 2010, Charles Zuker, who runs a lab at the University of California, and his team could identify receptor cells for all the tastes.
His studies suggested that our tongue has approximately 8,000 taste buds and each contains a mixture of receptor cells that allows them to taste any of the five tastes – sweet, salt, bitter, sour, and umami, a newly discovered savory taste that responds to glutamate.(source)
Myth #8
Stress contributes to graying of hair.
Image credit: Pixabay
Reality: No clear link has been found between stress and gray hair.
There’s a famous legend that Marie Antoinette’s hair turned white the night before she was guillotined. The reason suspected was the stress of impending decapitation. But scientists say that that is extremely unlikely. Even though stress may have little impact on gradual graying, the effect is almost negligible.
According to David Fisher, professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, graying of hair is caused by the depletion in the production of melanocytes that impart color to our hair. Stress hormones may impact the survival and/or activity of the melanocytes, but there has been no clear link established between stress and gray hair.
Tyler Cymet, head of family medicine at Sinai Hospital adds that graying of hair is “genetically outlined, but stress and lifestyle give you a variation of plus or minus five to 10 years.”(source)
Myth #9
Smoking Hookah is safer than smoking cigarettes.
Image credit: Pixabay
Reality: An hour-long hookah session produces about 100 to 200 times more smoke-filled air by volume than a single cigarette.
Researchers from the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) have conducted a new study. They confirmed in a crossover study of 13 smokers who used both cigarettes and hookahs that a hookah isn’t necessarily safer than a cigarette. As per the study, a hookah doesn’t necessarily remove all the harmful substances from the smoke.
According to UCSF research chemist Peyton Jacob III, while hookah smokers consume less nicotine than cigarette smokers, they have an increased exposure to carbon monoxide (CO) and the carcinogen benzene.
UCSF tobacco researcher Neal Benowitz further adds that smoking from a hookah daily presents a higher risk of cancer.(source)
Myth #10
You need to stay awake if you’ve had a concussion.
Reality: The myth that people need to be awake after a concussion likely grew out of serious head injuries that led to a coma. But concussions are seldom life-threatening.
The myth that people need to stay awake after incurring a concussion most likely grew out of a misunderstanding associated with a particular type of head injury. This type of injury involves brain bleeding and causes people to have a “lucid period,” followed by a coma or even death. But this is very uncommon and doesn’t pertain to people with normal concussions.
In fact, whenever a person endures an injury to the head, the brain requires time to heal by not being active so much. Under such circumstances, sleep seems perfect. It’s not bad, it’s a good thing. Some researchers argue that people suffering from concussions should be woken every hour or two on the first night to keep a check on whether they are alright. It should be checked whether they are able to hold a conversation before allowing them to go back to sleep again.(source)
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