The web is on fire wih the news that many pieces of medical advice that doctors have long prescribed have now been debunked by the British Medical Journal.

The only problem I have with this is that I’ve got one group of doctors (the Journal writers) telling me that another group of doctors is wrong.  Who am I to believe?  It’s like I’m caught in the middle of a tug-of-war.   Remember when eggs were bad for you?  Then they were good for you again?  Yeah….it’s like that.  Expect to come back here in six months and see a follow up story that reads “Debunked Medical Myths Now Rebunked.” 

Anyway, you know how mother always said that reading in dim lighting would ruin your eyesight?  Yeah, not so much.  Those warnings about cell phone use in hospitals being so dangerous?  Not really.  That claim that humans only use 10% of their brains?  Nope.  The distraught man in the photo has just been told, “You know that thing I told you about needing to drink 8 glasses of water a day?  Yeah, turns out I was wrong on that one.  Sorry.”  You can see why he’s so upset.  You’d be mad too if you drank 8 glasses of water a day for 20 years. 

Seriously, though, here’s what we learn from all this:  whatever we think we know for a fact…is probably wrong, and it’s at least not the certified gospel truth like we think it is.  Humanity has a long and well-documented history of realizing we were really WAY off on what we thought we knew.  So add these myths to the rest of them, the Earth is flat, the Sun revolves around the Earth, eggs are bad for you, and reading in dim light will make you blind. 

Or not.  Depends on what day it is.