Newsweek Magazine published an article on its web page last week entitled Top Seven Health Myths, citing a study that demonstrated even doctors often fall prey to common medical misconceptions. And they do, too, sometimes for the basest of self-interested reasons.

I recall sitting at the breakfast table with my Mother-in-Law one morning back in the early 1980s, reading the daily newspaper. I came across an article about a formal position statement from the American Medical Association’s annual enclave, which stated as clearly and simply as possible that…

There Is No Evidence That Diet Is Related To Health.

Mom of course denied it vehemently even as I handed her the story on page whatever, in her own favorite newspaper. She’d been a medical transcriptionist all her working life, spent her days around doctors and medical laboratories and test results and autopsy reports and diagnostic conferences, so she knew a lot about doctors and a hefty amount about medicine. She simply couldn’t believe the AMA would make such an outrageous statement denying something that “Every Mother Knows.”

I tried to explain to her the political affiliations of the AMA as a professional lobby with ties to some notorious and insidious industries – pharmaceuticals, Big Tobacco and the increasingly monopolistic food/drink processing conglomerates peddling nutritional garbage to our children. To make the industry lobbyists happy, those doctors would swear on a stack of Bibles that smoking doesn’t cause lung cancer, that drugs are good for you, and that your diet has nothing to do with your health. You’ve just gotta take all lobbying organizations with a large grain of salt, because their political back-room dealings often completely contradict what their individual members know for a fact to be true.

Let’s face it… the primary health care provider in this world is mostly Mom. Grandmas, Aunts and even wise nurse-ly neighbors can help, but Mom is who mostly gets to kiss the boo-boos, bandage the cuts and scrapes, dish out the medicine and try to balance the family’s diet so they can be as healthy as possible while avoiding gross obesity or other nutritional deficits that lead to disease. Thus any Mom would have laughed (or indignantly sputtered) about the AMA’s ridiculously self-serving lie that year. And by the next year’s enclave the position was completely reversed based on rank-and-file objections to the lie.

The study Newsweek focuses upon was published in the British Medical Journal in December. It identifies the top medical myths and reports that a surprising (to them) number of practicing physicians believe in those myths…

Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight. This one has very little scientific support. It can cause temporary eyestrain, but that disappears quickly in the presence of bright light.

Hair and fingernails continue to grow after death. Nope. After death the skin begins to contract, which gives an illusion that hair and nails are growing. They are not.

We only use 10% of our brains. This one really is the product of snake-oil salesmen peddling magical elixirs of life from the back of wagons in the early 20th century. That supposed 90% of useless brain has never been identified by neuroscientists, who find our brains tend to be active no matter where they look.

Using cell phones in hospitals is dangerous. Despite the fact that hospitals have almost universally bought into this myth, studies have shown that normal cell phone use has little to no interference effect with medical devices. In 2007 a study using 300 tests in 75 different treatment rooms found exactly zero interference from cell phones.

You should drink at least 8 glasses of water per day. Actually, we get an ample supply of fluid in a typical daily diet including juice, milk and even coffee or soda. Drinking too much water can cause severe electrolyte imbalance and has been known to cause death. If you’re thirsty, drink. If you’re not, don’t worry about it.

Shaved hair grows back faster and coarser. Oddly enough, I found this one surprising. But research does show that the texture, color and growth habits of hair – even on ladies’ legs! – doesn’t change when it’s cut, shaved, waxed or chemically removed.

So there you have it. Old Wives’ Tales we can go ahead and leave behind us. Happy mothering!

For all you guys out there who liked the name GuitarGreg, and for those who really, really loved CoolAssMojo, tough luck. It’s a girl, per the ultrasound, which isn’t 100% but is more reliable than dowsing or casting lots.

Our younger daughter seemed pretty convinced it would be a girl when she was here and the boys were only thinking up boy names. I thought she looked like she was pregnant with a girl too, so we’re happy with the confirmation. Another friend anxiously expecting their first baby wanted to know how you can guess the sex of a baby before having that semi-definitive ultrasound. Fact is, I don’t really know. Women’s intuition? I guessed correctly with both of mine, and now with both daughters. Maybe I’m just a good guesser.

There was no ultrasound when I was having babies. You juggled your lacy pink desires with the tons of boring blue stuff other people always buy for baby showers, then when they hand you the baby and tell you whether it’s a boy or girl, you start planning who you’re going to give away all the no longer apropos stuff to at their baby showers. It generally works out in the end for both parents and baby stuff manufacturers – while slightly more boy babies are born than girl babies, things even out in the first year or two by attrition. Just statistics, nothing against boys.

Since there haven’t always been ultrasounds that tell you a baby’s sex months before they’re born – and not everyone trusts the technology to be as harmless as it’s claimed to be – I thought I’d go looking to see what’s out there as folklore or old wives’ tales about knowing the sex of your baby well before he or she is born.

For those fond of ‘Oriental Wisdom’, there’s Chinese Gender Chart, which purports to tell you if it’s a boy or girl based on the age of the mother at the time of conception and the month during which Mom conceived. I’ve seen no statistical analysis of whether or not it works, but if you’re wondering and won’t get the ultrasound for a few more weeks, do let us know!

I also found a rundown of your basic folk wisdom based on indicators such as morning sickness, weight gain and general appearance, which I know to be unreliable because none of it applies to me or other Moms I’ve known. Still, here it is:

It’s a girl if…

• You had morning sickness early in pregnancy [Ha! I was sick all nine months with both a girl and a boy]

• Your baby’s heart rate is at least 140 beats per minute [This is standard for both girls and boys]

• You are “carrying high” [This one does apply, at least it did for me]

• You are carrying the weight in your hips and rear [How does that jive with "carrying high?"]

• Your left breast is larger than your right breast [Before or after?]

• Your hair develops red highlights [Um... I'm a redhead...]

• Your belly looks like a watermelon [ALL pregnant bellies look like watermelons before it's over!]

• You crave fruit and sweets [Does the ice cream that goes with the pickles count?]

• You don’t look quite as good as normal during pregnancy [Try losing 30 pounds before ever gaining an ounce and see how good you look]

• Your face breaks out [Duh]

• You are moodier than usual [Double Duh]

• You refuse to eat the heel of a loaf of bread [Those are edible?]

• Your breasts have really blossomed [On the left?]

• Your pillow faces south when you sleep [Hahahaha!]

• Your urine is yellow [Whose isn't?]

• You hang your wedding ring over your belly and it moves side to side[Dowsing?]

• You add your age at the time of conception and the number of the month you conceived, and the sum is an odd number [Is that how the Chinese worked it out?]

Well, you can guess how the indications go opposite of this if you’re going to have a boy baby. To which I’d supply the same sarcastic remarks. To tell you the truth, I knew my younger daughter was pregnant before she did, just by looking at her when they visited in mid-June. I kept my own counsel about that, but I sure as heck wasn’t surprised when we got the news officially. I didn’t have any inkling at that time whether it was a boy or a girl, but at that stage, who cares?

When they were here weekend before last and we got to play such fun name games, I knew from her reaction that she’d already intuited it’s a girl. She rolled her eyes at Elvis, Guitar Greg and Cool Ass Mojo, but gave us just the one girl’s name – Sunshine. She had that smug little self-smile on her face when her eyes were downcast (communing within herself, I guess you could call that), and I knew it’s a girl because she knew it.

I’m completely delighted, of course. There’s too many boys among the grandchildren in my family, not nearly enough girls. When I got the ultrasounds in my email I wrote back to ask how “girlie” we’re going to let Sunshine be. My daughter was Miss Prissy all-girl, all-pink, all the time when she was little, turned out to be quite the womanly woman too.

Just want to know what to make for the occasion when I go up there to help when the baby’s born. I was the world’s worst tree-climbing, ditch-digging Tomboy when I was growing up with my four sisters. Hated the color pink and those silly pink girlie dresses Dad always made us dress in for dinner – with the big sashes he’d tie for us as we lined up, making perfect bows (as if I cared one bit for how perfect the derned bow was!). Yet for my own daughters I went hog wild on lace and frilly girlie stuff, in every shade of pink imaginable. Go figure.

I think a nice soft-weave baby basket with lace and ribbons and soft pink satin lining, a pretty flowery pad and a pink-pink-pink quilt with pink buttons and a pink satin binding…

This is going to be so much fun!