Here are a few: When chicken pox starts popping out on a child, make sure he is quiet and never touches the itchy sores. If he does, there will be permanent scars! Wrong! (I have followed children who never touched the blisters or scabs and developed indented pits on their skin. Those pits did fill in eventually.) When children get the hard measles, they are to be kept quiet, in a dark room, or they might become cross-eyed or, even worse, blind. Wrong! (I have had children read, move around, and watch television, and their vision remained good and strong. They were less bored, also.)
When a person gets mononucleosis or hepatitis, the medical dictum was "stay in bed; no bathroom privileges for about a month." Wrong! A study was done about 20 years ago using soldiers at an army base. Hepatitis was epidemic. The enterprising doctor tried a little medical experiment: He sent half the men (about 20) back to duty with KP drill, marches, and exercises. The other half, the control group, remained at strict bed rest. You guessed it. There was no difference in the healing time of the two groups. If anything, the group who stayed down and quiet noticed fatigue and wasted muscles which slowed their convalescence.
Standard pediatric practice in the 1940s to 1960s: Start offering solid foods to babies in the first few weeks to get them used to the spoon and prevent the milk anemia due to lack of iron. Wrong! It is true that babies get anemic if they are just getting cow's milk that entire first year, so back in the 1920s it was thought to be a good move to give the baby some hard-boiled egg yoke at about 10 months of age, and then some beef gravy at about a year. That was not good enough for Gerber and Heintz; the race was on. They urged mothers and pediatricians to start earlier and earlier with some rice cereal, and then bananas, throw in a little boiled carrot at about three months, and then all the rest of them, even including animal proteins.
So what happened? The iron-poor or milk anemia was prevented, but we gave many of those babies allergies to these foods, and many of them could not eat them again in their entire lives without getting a reaction. Sorry about that. We had no idea that their intestines were that immature. We finally figured out that the digestive enzymes in these little babies are only meant to digest human milk. The solid foods could not be sufficiently broken down to the non-allergenic amino acids, simple sugars, and fatty acids. So, when the partially digested foods were absorbed, the baby's immune system would develop antibodies against those foods.
Most babies do not get teeth until about six to eight months of life. That is God's way of saying, "Okay, now you may try a few things." Some experts have suggested that the first solid foods might consist of zucchini, parsnips, turnips, and rutabagas -- or, at least, some foods to which one would happily become sensitive.
I am glad I did not believe all those things they taught me at the science place. Come to think of it, there were a lot of things they taught us that they must have made up; I am sure you have a good idea what the medical school said about chiropractors.
Lendon Smith, M.D.
Portland, Oregon
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