5 Myths About Curing Common Injuries (You Probably Believe)
In the middle of any kind of health emergency, large or small, you'll immediately be surrounded by friends shouting tips about how to handle it. When you get all of this conflicting advice ("He's choking! Kick him in the balls!"), you wonder if their medical knowledge is coming from actual science, old wives' tales they heard from their grandma, or something they saw in a comic book. Don't bother asking -- they don't know, either.
So, from time to time we like to go look up the actual medical advice from experts to find all of the ways conventional wisdom gets these things disastrously wrong.
Don't Tilt Your Head Back to Stop a Nosebleed
If you were the same stereotypical nerd that we were in high school, then you know the pain of occasional nosebleeds as intimately as wedgie rash. And whether these sudden gouts of blood are due to a dodgeball to the face or random chance, everyone instinctively does the same thing: squeeze the nostrils shut and tilt their head back.
You should probably wait until the fight ends to try that, though.
It makes sense, considering that the first order of business is to keep blood from running all over your one good T-shirt. Sure, bloodstains look badass when they're new, but when they dry, they just look like you dribbled brown gravy all over yourself.
But Actually ...
Not only does holding your head back not do anything to actually stop the nosebleed, but it grants the blood free access to flow down your throat, which is actually a worse place for it to be than on your Dragon Ball Z shirt. Sure, you might figure that blood is supposed to be inside you anyway, so it can't do any more harm down there, but actually, this technique can result in choking, or, if the blood travels further down, stomach irritation and vomiting. All things considered, you'll only wind up grossing everyone out even more.
"... and then I barfed up a gallon of my own blood. She said she'll call me."
What Can You Do Instead?
The consensus among doctors is that you should sit down, pinch your nose, and lean forward. Leaning forward will help you avoid swallowing your blood, pinching your nose will prevent the blood from escaping it, and sitting down will help you not be standing around like a jackass while waiting for the bleeding to stop. Most nosebleeds will stop by themselves within 10 minutes, so you can usually ride them out in this manner without making your house look like the finale of Django Unchained.
If Poisoned, Don't Induce Vomiting (Unless a Doctor Says So)
So your friend got distracted on beer night and accidentally drank a glass of paint thinner. It's the kind of comical situation that we who write for comedy sites find ourselves in every day. But unfortunately, unlike in Wile E. Coyote cartoons, a case of poisoning rarely results in your face turning green and then you jumping through a wall. Most of us probably know what to do about it, though -- after all, it's not rocket science. You have to get the poison out. Two fingers down the throat will bring that stuff right back up again. If it's good enough for James Bond, it's good enough for us.
"If there's anything two fingers can't accomplish, I haven't found it yet."
But Actually ...
If some substance is doing damage to the inside of your friend's body, then, like chasing an angry raccoon out of your house via the back door, it's going to do more damage on its way out. Many poisons are acidic or alkaline in nature, so although it would have been better not to swallow poison in the first place, bringing it back up via the esophagus can just burn your throat out.
4 out of 5 doctors advise against burning vital organs. The fifth is standing behind you right now.
Remember that your stomach is full of acid anyway -- it might be able to deal with an acidic substance. Sitting in a pool of acid is literally its job. But anyone who has had to contend with heartburn knows that the throat doesn't deal with it so well. Your lungs, if you should happen to gag while blowing volatile acidic chunks, even less so.
What Can You Do Instead?
Your problem is that there is no universal first-aid response for "poisoning" because there are a million different substances out there that all wreak havoc on your insides in different ways. You have to call for help -- and while you wait, you can make sure your friend doesn't have any poison left in his mouth. If he stops breathing, do CPR. But that's it, until you get instructions from somebody smarter than you.
Not Steven Hawking. He isn't even a dentist.
Now, if you're lucky, you know what your friend drank and it came in a bottle with instructions on the back that tell you what to do if you manage to put it inside your dumb ass. But in any case, don't mess around with whatever folksy remedy your grandmother told you about, involving vomit or anything else. Call poison control, because the only antidote that can help you comes with the letters "M.D." on its business card.
A Cold Shower Does Nothing to Speed Sobriety
We were all young once, and some of us still are, so most of us know the joys of waking up drunk after a night of partying. It's usually a week after we swore to never do that again. So what happens if you have things to do and people to meet, but you still need to hold onto the walls to stop the room from spinning? Conventional wisdom says that you jump into a cold shower to scare your body sober.
This can also be an effective solution for morning wood.
But Actually ...
It turns out your shower water does not possess any magical healing properties. It does, however, have the ability to give you hypothermia when you're drunk.
As we've mentioned in the past, despite what cute cartoons about droopy-eyed brandy-carrying Saint Bernards may lead you to believe, alcohol does not warm you up. In fact, alcohol lowers your overall body temperature, so you're making things a lot worse when you add cold water to the equation.
Thermodynamics, you insipid bitch!
"Well, better cold than drunk," you say defiantly, because you like to argue with computer screens while reading articles on the Internet. That's the thing, though: Cold water doesn't do shit to cancel the effects of alcohol. Worse than that, in extreme cases, the shock of cold water may even knock a drunk person unconscious. So unless your weekend plans include lying naked in a pool of icy water, we strongly advise you to stay away from cold showers.
What Can You Do Instead?
Although there are a million different folk cures for drunkenness, from coffee to Berocca to a round of slaps to the face, the truth is that the only true way to sober up is to wait it out while your punished, weeping liver churns through the alcohol. You could of course try drinking in moderation in the first place, but how in the hell will you tolerate being around your drunk friends then?
"Board meeting, shmoard meeting -- do another shot, candy-ass!"
Don't Try to Fight a Burn With Something Cold
If you've ever fried up some bacon and just tried to grab it out of the pan with your bare hands because the desire to eat it momentarily overpowered your ability to think thoughts, then you probably know what a burn feels like. And at that point, instinct kicks in: cold defeats hot, therefore we must apply something cold to the burn. You grab some ice or a bag of frozen peas to soothe the pain, figuring why else would the Ice Amulet be so effective against Fire Ogres in Orcs Must Die, if not to teach us proper medical treatment for burns?
"Everything I know about video games tells me this man should have lived."
But Actually ...
You might temporarily make the pain go away, but putting ice on a burn is sort of like stitching a wound with a nail gun -- you're just inflicting more damage. In one study on lab rats, researchers compared different remedies for burns, including a 10-minute application of ice cubes to the burn. They concluded that the ice cube treatment resulted in "the most severe damage," which careful readers will notice is not at all how remedies are supposed to work.
In another study, researchers gave 24 healthy volunteers first-degree burns and then measured how they responded to what was a lab equivalent of ice-cooling a burn. The study has proven that the line between "researcher" and "sadistic madman" is often nonexistent, and that ice-cooling a burn did not result in less pain and inflammation when compared to the "doing nothing at all" treatment.
"You call it laziness, I call it medicine."
The thing is that ice can cause frostbite, which in itself is a form of burn and can only worsen the injury. Have you ever responded to a sudden cold breeze by lighting yourself on fire? It's kind of the same logic.
What Can You Do Instead?
If you want immediate cooling, you can run some tap water over the burn to soothe the pain. Covering the burn with a sterile gauze bandage prevents air from getting to it, which will help further reduce the pain. Painkillers are also good for reducing pain, but hopefully you didn't need a comedy website to bring you such groundbreaking insights.
Our sources include that one time we took a ton of Vicodin and let our friend Chad try the knife trick from Aliens.
Urinating on a Jellyfish Sting Just Increases the Pain
At some point in humanity's long history of terrible ideas, somebody got stung by a jellyfish and somebody else decided to unzip their pants and try to piss it better. The remedy was popularized in that Friends episode where Chandler had to pee on Monica's sting, and it's entered our mythology as the right thing to do because we are the kind of society that gets its medical advice from 1990s sitcoms. And yes, we're aware that we are a pop culture comedy site and we're making that joke immediately before doling out medical advice.
The Cracked health plan consists primarily of various dilutions of tiger penis.
But Actually ...
If you're stung by a jellyfish and someone starts spraying their pee all over it, you're going to wind up in more pain than you were before. You see, jellyfish stinging cells are actually activated by fresh water. That's their cue to start pumping venom into your flesh. Surprise: Your urine is mostly fresh water. If it's not, you have far bigger problems than jellyfish stings to worry about.
So you no doubt think, as Chandler did, that you're heroically coming to a woman's rescue by bucking up and doing what needs to be done, gross as that may be. But if Friends were realistic, she'd be shrieking in pain as though he was pissing acid. That'd be the rest of the episode: Monica lying in a puddle of piss, howling in pain, and begging him to kill her for 20 straight minutes until they just cut to commercial.
Although this assumes that Monica was not into watersports.
What Can You Do Instead?
The most important thing is to try to get rid of the stinging cells. You can try to scrape these away with something (like a credit card). Afterward you can pour some salt water on the sting. Salt water, unlike urine, deactivates the stinging cells and eases the pain. As for the urine myth, professionals concede that, after the stingers have been removed, "warm urine might soothe the sting based on its warmth alone." You know what else can do that? Literally anything else in the world that happens to be warm.
Daniel Nest has a blog where he sometimes writes about dolls. Tell him how freaking weird you think that is on his Twitter.
For more ways you're making it harder on yourself, check out 6 Life Saving Techniques From the Movies (That Can Kill You). Or learn about 8 Medical Terms Your Doctor Uses to Insult You.
If you're pressed for time and just looking for a quick fix, then check out Why the Scooby-Doo Mystery Team Is Terrible At Mysteries.
And stop by LinkSTORM to learn how to give your cat the heimlich.
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We have some bad news: tossing your drunk friends in bed can kill them, vitamin water is terrible stuff and your favorite book sellers are now taking pre-orders for a text book written and illustrated entirely by the Cracked team! Hitting shelves in October, Cracked's De-Textbook is a fully-illustrated, systematic deconstruction of all of the bullshit you learned in school.
It's loaded with facts about history, your body, and the world around you that your teachers didn't want you to know. And as a bonus? We'll give you the truth about drugs.
