Most Medical Research is Just Recycled Information

Many topics come up during the breaks between my wife's yoga and Pilate's classes. Usually, the underlying topic of the conversation is health and I offered some information on combining different supplements. Some vitamins, and other supplements, interfere with others and should be taken at different times for maximum assimilation. One of the students said she didn't have time to do all the research concerning what to take when, and was tired of being on overload from being bombarded with information. I can relate to that, but in a slightly different way.

If we want to be a participant in our health, we need to know how the body works and what it's trying to tell us. But, useless facts are more abundant than helpful information. Translated in a different way: knowledge and wisdom aren't the same. If you suffer from diabetes, you need to focus on diabetes, not what celebrity got arrested for DWI.

A recent example of what I consider useless information is the research project that discovered why we get the flu more often in the winter than during the summer. A short version of the project amounts to the findings that the flu virus propagates and mutates more readily at lower temperatures than at temperatures in the eighties and above. The research also theorized that the flu virus was transported more readily by air rather than by touch, kissing or other direct contact. The theory was, and it was only a theory, that the virus floated through the air when it was dry, but when the humidity was high, water droplets would form on the virus and it would drop out of the air. No solution came from the research, just more information that most can't use. Some other researchers, possibly to perpetuate their jobs, made a big deal out of it. If a person was to sit down and contemplate the problem, it would take about five minutes to come up with the same results. Unfortunately, most of us have filled our lives so full of consumerism we don't have five minutes to sit and think, so we rely on plugging our heads full of information, a lot of it useless, believing that will solve the problem.