written by my man and I, together-gether, on something we have close to our hearts
“Too much chillies bad for you”
“Durians are very heaty”
"I try not to take medicine when I’m sick, coz’ I don't like pills, they're bad for health"
"No la, I don't want medicine, I let my flu run its course. I don't want all sorts of chemicals in my body, from those pharmacies"
"No thank you - I don't want to get addicted to painkillers, it's better I just suffer now and wait it out."
Sounds familiar? Its amazing what you hear these days.
What do you believe? How do we know? How can we tell the myths from the facts? How do we extract the good advice from all these bullshit?
It used to be “Don’t cut your toenails at night, otherwise the monster will get you”. Now that we know there’s really no monsters under the bed, we’ve ended up being scared of ghost. And when we wise up and figured out that ghost don’t exist, we’re worried about aliens visiting us and adopting us for sex.
Intergalactic orgies - doesn’t get better than that, does it?
So, once we’ve sorted out in our head that aliens are just too far to visit us and haven’t gotten round to dropping by our lovely blue planet, what’s next?
Durians are just too heaty? Why are we still stuck at this one?
We as a society cannot progress until we can differentiate these two:
“I believe” and
“I know”
I’m going to state the obvious but you’ll be surprised that most folks you encounter can’t tell the difference. Hack, they didn’t know there’s a huge difference.
I believe - is a conviction that we think we know while
I know - is simply knowing a fact.
‘I believe’ is just something we’ve assumed. When somebody ‘believes in something’, they really don’t know but makes a guess or an assumption. While ‘I know’ is simply and purely stating a fact. We can end up knowing wrong (or bad) things but you either know it or don’t.
Confused yet?
If I hold up a mug and tell you that I’ve got hot milo in it, once you’ve seen some steam rising from the mug, you’ll believe me. You don’t know if there’s hot milo, or even milo or anything hot for that matter, but you believe me. Maybe because I hardly lie (yeah right! everybody lies) and you notice the steam.
So, you believe I have hot milo in my mug but you don’t know if there’s hot milo in the mug unless you’ve taken a sip. You only know that I’ve told you I’ve got hot milo in my mug. See the difference?
If you see an apple, and its red, you know its red. Maybe you’re not sure what shade of red it is but you know its a red apple. You don’t have to believe its a red apple simply because you already know.
Its only when you don’t know, that’s when the ‘believe’ comes into play. Some call it faith and there’s plenty of derivative names we give it. But when we believe, it really means, we don’t know!
But what I really want to talk about is more specifically on something that I hear very often, something we hear and maybe, say a lot.
When we hear, read or say "I try not to take medicine when I’m sick, because I don't like medicine, they are bad for health". This “bad for health” part, do we believe it or do we know?
Organic farming, believe or know?
The durians are heaty business, believe or know?
Anyway, back to me meds, very often when I offer someone in pain a painkiller, I hear that kind of response. I'm often referred to as the medicine woman by friends, some of them regard to my habit of carrying painkillers & anti-histamine pills negatively (call me the `druggie'). However, there were times when my medicine pouch in my handbag gets pretty useful to some of these friends.
Sometimes when I'm in the mood, I ask them back, "So how is it that you know that painkiller is bad for you and where did you hear that from?"
Most of the time, they don't have the answer or have ever thought of how they came to think that medicine is bad for you. Some of them just respond, "Aiya, I just know lah."
Am sure we can all track down how we started to believe in something that we know nothing of - except perhaps we hear it from someone we trust, like our mothers, friends, teachers.
Speaking of things we hear from mothers. My mom likes to tell me not to shower right after a meal, it gives bloaty stomach, when asked why, she cannot answer.
The way to bust a myth is through information, education & confrontation. It never ceases to amaze and amuse me how easy it is to get people to believe something without having to provide solid information and facts. Again, the believe vs. the know.
So I brought up the subject last night with J, "What do I do with these people? They do a lot of things & believe in many things that they have no information & answers to...like they say medicine is bad for them."
He suggested, "Tell them to stop using cars then, tell them to walk to work, it's more natural that way and safer.". Actually, he’s right, there’s more evidence that cars are bad for your health than meds. Its also a top polluter. Do the environment and your health some good - starting walk to work.
"Tell them to stop wearing shoes too, its bad for them”. I’m so amused at how many parents would deny their own children proper medical care yet make them wear shoes all the time. Did you know that children who wear too much shoes are bad? No? Its because we don’t adequately develop the middle of our foot and the arch collapses. Now, don’t believe me, go and know it yourself. By knowing, you might save your child from developing flat foot. Love you child enough to google it?
I’m not saying meds aren’t bad for you. Hack, even fruits can kill those who are allergic to them. Its just that we don’t know of all its sides effect, we really don’t know if its good or bad. There’s plenty of clinical trials done on meds and the side effects are usually published, so you know. Do they know it all? Of course not, but when new information emerges, we get to know about it, like Vioxx. Even if it only causes an increased chance of heart attacks to a small population of test subjects, they took it off the shelves.
Just like we don’t know if drinking too much barley and coconut water has any long term side effects. Do we?
Just as organic chocolate is pure poison for dogs, there's really no more harm when something is synthetic as opposed to when its organically produced. A friend of mine studying chemistry once told me that a vitamin-C molecule is a vitamin-C molecule. They won't call it that unless its has the structure of the vitamin-C molecule. As long as the molecules have the same structure, they are identical, organic or otherwise. The only probable reason why organic is far more expensive is because its probably more expensive to produce that's why there's all the unverifiable fuss about organic vitamins are better then the synthetic ones. Actually, he added that synthetic ones are safer as they are precise in the synthesis and they can produce pure vitamin-C as opposed to organic extracts that may contain other kind of biological pollutants if the extraction process if flawed. Irony? You bet.
When J was a child, his grandma and everyone elder always told him the side effects of MSG. They called it “Ajinomoto” then, not knowing the active ingredient, MSG. You’ve probably heard that taking too much Ajinomoto will lead to hair loss and all other kinds of other unimaginative nasties. J asked them where did they hear that and they would just give him a look telling him that he’s being cheeky. So J would smile back at them and say that he preferred to loose his hair and be as smart as the Japanese. That usually shut them up.
So, one day at university, J was bored out of his wits in the library, and he decided to compile all the research on MSG to understand its side effects. They had research after research which concluded that MSG caused some side effects to those who are allergic to it (like some folks are allergic to apples but we don’t think that apples are bad for us, do we?) and that if taken in huge amounts (like a kilo without food or water at a time), dehydration would set in.
That’s it?
J was actually disappointed that there was no link to cancer or hair loss, nothing! No evidence of it being bad for our health. Hah! J knew Ajinomoto’s bad name was a conspiracy made out from housewifes who were frustrated that their families were eating out more often than they fancied. That was like 15 years ago and J did some searching just before co-writing this article and found the same results today.
So why are we still hearing this till today? 15 years, ago, without the Internet, it was understandable. You needed to be in a proper science library but today? With Google and Wikipedia? What excuse do we muster up?
Why our need to believe and our reluctance to know? What happened to our curiosity? Is exploration dead?
The next time you deny your body (or the ones in your care) real medical treatment, ask yourself if this believe thing is really an excuse for me being plain lazy or do I know something the world really doesn’t.
The one thing that's really bad for us is our reluctance to find things out.
I have to learn how to blow my hair at home...to avoid dead pan flat look, to get this look.
getting into a pose with my FBI agents on a wedding dinner gig mission...
I think this new hair is a new chapter in looking ultra feminine...I have posted more pictures of newly styled short hair on my FB :)
-rs.jpg)
