I’ve gotten tons of glurgey, easily debunked emails from college educated, middle-aged men and women. (Although not, to the best of my recollection, in 1983.) I don’t think education, much less age, is any guarantee against misinformation or misunderstanding.
Especially if the story lends itself to exclamation points!!!
ISTR that the Red Cross standard is at least 56 days between blood donations. I used to go and give every two months, regular as clockwork, until I finally - much to my surprise - was borderline anemic, and had to take iron supplements for a couple of weeks. My doctor suggested I give every three months, instead.
Well then what’s wrong with your body? It was supposed to adapt.
I’ve gotten those emails too. And they aren’t personally related stories about people personally known, whether now or then. They are stupid emails.
Actually, it pretty much is, just without the email. No one is doubting that your friends are nice people and weren’t intentionally deceiving you. But as anyone who has read up on urban legends knows, this is how they start and propagate.
It’s just pretty unlikely that they got the details right. Not impossible, but you need more than a story to make any kind of conclusion about human adaptability.
And I’m sure the people who first started those emails thought that their friends were totally trustworthy, too. You’ve been here long enough to know that “A friend of a friend” isn’t going to cut it. If a college educated friend told you that Jamie Lee Curtis had ambiguous genitalia or that a disgruntled Munchkin can be seen hanging himself in the Wizard of Oz, you wouldn’t believe that either. This isn’t any different.
Yes it is. My friend doesn’t know Jamie Lee Curtis. She personally knew the man she told me about.
And until someone can demonstrate an actual basis for the skepticism, something medical that shows that this isn’t possible, I think it’s bizarre and rude to continue to argue with me about my friend’s veracity. She wasn’t the sort of person who talked about random shit she “heard somewhere”, not even close. She was 50 years old, born and raised in Ireland, wealthy, extremely well-educated, intelligent and articulate, and very old fashioned in many ways. Believe me, if you knew her, you wouldn’t for a second question either her understanding of what she had been told, or the truth and accuracy of what she was telling you, ok?
If in fact it’s not possible (again, good luck finding THAT study) then the explanation isn’t that she heard it wrong or told it wrong, it would most likely be that her neighbor left out the part where he’s got that disease in the same way as the person in the story. But we’ll never know until someone does such a study, since both he and my friend are long dead.
Jesus.
You are aware that the phenomenon of urban legends long predates the existence of the personal computer, let alone e-mail? People have been passing on dubious second hand stories since time immemorial, and their date of birth, wealth, education, nation of origin, ability to talk purty, or the relative age of their fashion, have never been shown to be a barrier to transmission. Fuck, I doubt that there’s a single person in this thread who hasn’t told a story that was, in its particulars, incorrect, either because they garbled it themselves, or it was garbled before they heard it. This is not an imputation of dishonesty, it is simply an inescapable facet of the human condition: we are not perfect recorders of information. We forget, conflate, and re-invent “facts” on an almost constant basis, not out of intent, but as a by-product of the way our minds work.
I once knew a guy who was a clean-cut, upstanding, painfully decent fellow with a PhD in Chemistry. He told me, straight-out, that he’d once seen a copy of the unabridged version of A Princess Bride, by S. Morgenstern, at his college library. Problem is, I know for a fact that there is no such book - the book A Princess Bride was written and conceived entirely by William Goldman, including the conceit that he was simply editing an older version of a book he’d read as a child. There was never an S. Morgenstern, or any older version of Goldman’s book before Goldman himself wrote it. My friend wasn’t lying to me, nor was he stupid or (generally) ignorant. He was simply mistaken about something he’d thought he’d seen.
It’s also worth noting that the person you’re describing as being so impeachable isn’t the actual source of the story. Even if we grant to her the ability to perfectly recall a story she heard several years earlier with perfect fidelity (an ability, incidentally, that would be literally super-human) the story still could be incorrect due to any number of other factors: the person she heard it from might have misunderstood what his doctors told him. The doctors themselves might have misdiagnosed him - even if we assume competence, this happened decades ago, and medical science has advanced significantly since then. And, of course, we’re not hearing it directly from your unimpeachable friend - we’re hearing it from you, several years after you first heard it, and you may be misremembering the details yourself. Or, for that matter, you may not be as good a judge of character as you like to think. Which I say not with the intent to slam you, but simply to point out that you are as human as the rest of us, and are as vulnerable to making these sorts of mistakes as anyone else. And as such, it is important to be mindful of these sorts of mistakes when hearing an anecdotal story that makes some unlikely claims.
Which, lastly, leads us to the idea that, if one cannot scientifically debunk a particular story, they are obligated to accept it as true. I do not think this is a wise way to plot your course through life. The idea that this person’s body had acclimated itself to regular blood loss by producing a heightened amount of blood seems very unlikely. I’m not aware of any mechanism in the body which would allow this story to be true - but I am, admittedly, not a doctor. At the very least, it seems to fly in the face of stories I’ve heard from other people who have donated blood regularly, and had the opposite reaction: they became anemic, and were forced to step down the frequency of their donations. None of which is proof positive that this story could not have happened as you relate, of course, but it is enough to warrant skepticism over the anecdote absent any sort of evidence that such a reaction is possible.
Which, I think, is entirely appropriate for a board that claims “fighting ignorance” as it’s primary function.
My university educated English teacher who repeated to my class the, “Dog choking on a burglar’s fingers” story claimed to have known someone it actually happened to (despite snopes.com showing no record of it ever actually occurring). And others have given many explanations–the man misunderstood what his doctor told him, or the woman misunderstood what he told her. Or maybe you misunderstood. Like a game of Telephone where the message gets a bit more garbled on each subsequent retelling. It doesn’t mean someone was maliciously lying.
But you’ve been on this board for a while. This isn’t the kind of place where we just say, hey, that’s awesome unless we hear otherwise. I’ll say it again–it has NOTHING to do with how honest your friend is. It’s just not the way things work on this board. We tend to question just about everything under the sun. And besides that, we don’t know your friend. How honest she is has no bearing on the conversation. Citing facts or examples of such a disorder would help.
Anyway, if a medical doctor does decide to comment on this thread (paging Qadgop, please!), that would be great. But it just seems strange that you accept that we take this–or anything–at face value until someone proves it wrong.
In MPSIMS, I do expect that you at least keep your skepticism polite and restrained, as opposed to making it a point to aggressively disregard it as goo, yes.
In college, I had an astronomy teacher repeat the “water goes clockwise down the drain in the Northern hemisphere” canard, too.
I don’t think this accurately reflects any of the posts made to this thread.
The examples being given of how this story could be bullshit are all of rumors and old wives tales that lots of people have heard. This doesn’t qualify as that. I’ve never heard it anywhere else ever, and neither has anyone in this thread. That makes it fundamentally different from email myths and urban legends.
And since no one has backed the skepticism with anything factual that undermines the possibility of the story being accurate, and I have in fact provided a bit of information showing that the body can produce excess blood, if not for the reason given in this story, I think the story is ahead of the skepticism.
You are welcome to believe that, but I think you are putting way too much emphasis on your personal relationship with the person who told you the story. It fits the pattern of all urban legends so far, and IMO the fact that there is a condition where the human body can produce too much blood isn’t much of a support for this story.
That’s just silly.
What pattern is that? It certainly doesn’t fit the pattern of being any kind of urban legend, seeing as how this is the only time anyone in this thread ever heard of it, which kinda makes any notion of calling it an “urban legend” a stretch.
So please identify the “pattern” that it “fits”.
As for support, there’s more for the story (person who told it, fact that condition can occur) than against it (crickets…)
(And my emphasis is on the person, the time, and the circumstances, not our relationship. )
You’ve presented an incomplete story that is impossible to falsify. You have provided no data: none of this man’s symptoms, signs, lab test results, or even a cogent explanation of the etiology of his diagnosis to indicate that, even if true, this excess blood was due to a pathological adaptation of hematopoiesis caused by routine blood donation and not a astounding coincidence of good Samaritan and a potentially lethal blood disorder.
The sole supporting factors for this story are that the storyteller was reliable and that such a condition can exist. As to the former, I have no reason to believe your friend was deliberately trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. However, even intelligent and honest of people have been know to get their facts confused when relating stories involving medicine. My relatives do all the time. This, unfortunately, can be even more true when the facts are coming from the sick and/or elderly.
As to the later, yes, a condition called polycythemia vera does it exists. It results from mutation in a JAK kinase, that causes erythroid precursors to become hypersensitive to erythropoietin, the hormone that regulates RBC production. However, this is a constitutively active mutation that results in constant over production of RBCs, not sporadic flurries of activity occurring at 6 week intervals. It’s also a pathology. I’ll state that again. It’s pathological. It is not a fantastic way for the body to adapt to anything. It is a disease that has a high degree of morbidity and mortality. It’s also on the Red Cross’s deferred list.
This brings us to the facts going against the story. First of all, there is absolutely no known mechanism whereby this type physiological adaptation can occur. I don’t know how to phrase that any more simply. There is simply no evidence that our homeostatic mechanisms are able to adapt to such temporally separated stimuli. If such evidence were to come about, as in if this story were true, it would sure to be written up and published in some medical journal, studied further, and the results of that study used to alter donation guidelines so that it doesn’t happen any more beause, once again, such a state is pathological not adaptive.
Second of all, the symptomatic phase of polycythemia, if it manifests any symptoms at all, is at a RBC count that is almost twice normal, not a mere 500mLs worth of blood.
Finally, if the story were true the ending would have been much different. He would not simply have resumed his donation routine and lived happily ever after. As stated above, he likely would have been deferred from donating at all. More to the point, the end would have more realistically read: "His doctor realized that due to the patients age and elevated hematocrit, this man was in grave jeopardy of having a stroke, transient ischemic attack, pulmonary embolism, deep vein thrombosis, myocardial infarction etc. and immediately admitted him to the hospital, pumped him full of anticoagulants, and worked to bring his RBCs down to normal levels.
You’re free to believe what ever you like, but just like I don’t need to search the deepest darkest reaches of the Amazon to know that unicorns don’t exist, I don’t need to read about or run a decades long study with adequate sample size to know that this story is at best a gross misunderstanding of what actually happened.
And while IANAD, I am well on my way to becoming one.
Very well done, Crawlspace.
Too bad you didn’t start with this instead of completely undermining your credibility by offering up menstruation as the proof that this doesn’t happen.
I don’t think you really understand how this “credibility” thing works.
Right back atcha.
Just checking, based on the post above, do you still think that the story you related is likely to be true? If not, what changed your mind?