Oh… another way to tackle the “lowers denfenses” argument. If the body temperature does not change, then defenses ought not be lowered. Slight breezes (like the one I encountered yesterday and today) aren’t going to budge your body temperature one stinking bit. Also, as my doctor told me, significant heat will do just a good a job of lowering defenses as significant cold. However, I have not encountered the belief or have experienced myself heat leading to symptoms. In fact, the folk remedy for a cold is to get as warm as possible.
I think the body merely senses cold and turns on symptoms. (Maybe the reason it doesn’t react to heat is that there’s a lot a person can do to shield from cold, but very little to shield from heat. And besides, when one has a fever he will normally try not to do anything to make himself even hotter anyway. Unless he’s Russian.)
On a related note, I discovered that the Japanese believe many things that Westerners would think wacky - one of the wackiest (although I never heard anyone talk about Fan Death - probably because I lived in the North and it doesn’t get very hot for very long) is that men will lose the ability to have sex if they watch their wife give birth!
Sorry for the mispelling, but it’s good this gives me the opportunity to present links. (Hey, I accept ya’ll for the lazy one-handed mouse clickers that you are…
mostly cuz i’m really lazy too and am just going to paste the first few decent links from google. Also, the quotes aren’t necessarily the most informative, convincing, or interesting parts of the linked pages. Just the first. But it’s enough for the purpose.)
From Wikipedia:Hormesis:
In toxicology, hormesis is a dose response phenomenon characterized by a low dose stimulation, high dose inhibition, resulting in either a J-shaped or an inverted U-shaped dose response. A pollutant or toxin showing hormesis thus has the opposite effect in small doses than in large doses.
As an example, challenging mice with small doses of gamma ray radiation shortly before irradiating them with very high levels of gamma rays actually decreases the likelihood of cancer. There is a similar effect when dioxin is given to rats.
Exerpt from fancy-shmancy [sounding] journal article:
The concept of chemical hormesis has a long history, originating over a century ago from the research of Schulz (1), who noted that many chemicals were able to stimulate growth and respiration of yeast at low doses but were inhibitory at higher levels. This concept of a generalized low-dose stimulation-high-dose inhibition was gradually supported by similar observations with other chemicals and eventually became known as the Arndt-Schulz law. Although Schulz (1) ushered in the so-called modern concept of hormesis, Paracelsus (2), writing in the 16th century, likewise noted that various toxic substances may be beneficial in small quantities.
Despite the widespread recognition of apparent hormetic effects, which continued into the early decades of the 20th century, Stebbing (2) argues that the Arndt-Schulz law gradually fell into disuse because it did not provide an adequate explanatory (i.e., mechanism-based) capacity. Nonetheless, over the years a continuing stream of observations has been reported (2) in toxicological publications and the broader biological literature that document low-dose stimulations.
From Answers.com (biology) Providing stimulus by nontoxic amounts of a toxic agent.
your response is another example of how no one’s even heard about this stuff… conspiracy! conspiracy!
And about hole drilling…
Pst, I’ll bet getting a hole dug in your skull once in a while will make you strong as bull (as we russians say) against meningitis.
Fan death? Husbands rendered unable to perform * for life* after seeing their wife give birth? This stuff is classic! As a minor hijack, could someone possibly provide any sites that list more of these wacky, generally eastern/asian beliefs? One couldn’t make this stuff up…
If anyone needs to run an experiment, I may have an unusually high tolerance to fans during sleep because I’ve had one in my room for about seven years. What can I say, my room is stuffy. Perhaps we can develope a vaccine.
She & yes, she did. It was during the summer and you can bet your bippy I had my fan going all night in my apartment also. I’m guessing she was honest and had hers going in hers.
That would be a good joke. Anyway, these were Korean teachers who teach English in the public and private schools (not the hagweons).
Peter: Egon, this reminds me of the time you tried to drill a hole in your head, remember that? Egon: That would have worked if you didn’t stop me.
Ghostbusters (1984)
Regarding the fans, I think this is similar to the idea some people have that aquarium snails kill fish. The prosaic explanation is that fish just die for other causes and then the snails get blamed for doing the cleanup duty they were made for.
