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15 Beauty Treatments That Are A Total Scam

Post author By Nina Bahadur
Post date December 4, 2019

We constantly see new beauty products and treatments that promise amazing results, from picture-perfect skin to waist-length, shiny hair. But the unfortunate truth is that a number of products out there don’t have much, if any, scientific backing. They can be ineffective at best and downright harmful at worst.
You should always do your research before spending your hard-earned money. Here’s what the experts say to be wary of.

1. At-Home Derma Rollers

Maybe you’ve heard of micro-needling—running a roller of tiny sterile needles over your skin to boost collagen production and help absorb skincare products. According to Jacqueline Schaffer, MD, micro-needling can be really effective—but you should always have this done at a doctor’s office, never at home.
The needles of a derma roller range from 0.25 millimeters to 3.0 millimeters in length (though anything over 1.5 millimeters is not recommended for at-home use under any circumstances), meaning they can go quite deeply into your skin and potentially cause damage if used incorrectly.

“It’s something that can actually worsen your skin,” Schaffer says. “It can cause more injury and disturb your skin’s texture. Your [desired] outcome is to have a more even skin texture, which is what the fine needles should do, because it should stimulate collagen and repair. But because it’s manual and not done by a machine, [at-home derma rollers are] actually causing damage and unevenness in you.”
Ultimately, Schaffer says, your skin can end up looking irregular—and there are safety concerns, too.
Without proper sterilization, your derma roller could put you at risk for serious infections or flare-ups of existing skin conditions. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is looking to regulate these devices to keep users safe.
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“With anything that is going to puncture your skin, you can really hurt yourself,” Schaffer adds. “It’s going to be a complete shock to your skin, and [at home] there’s no supervision.”

2. Eye Cream in a Jar

The skin around your eyes is generally thinner and more delicate than the skin on the rest of your face, as Rachel Nazarian, MD, a board-certified dermatologist, told HuffPost. As such, you may well want a specific cream to help hydrate that area—but make sure it comes in the right type of container.
“You need to be very, very careful with certain eye cream,” Schaffer says. “If it comes in a jar, after the cream is exposed to oxygen it’s going to oxidize. So that expensive eye cream is going to be goop.”

“Oxygen, sunlight, and microbes, which cosmetic products are often exposed to during storage and use, can change their characteristics, [resulting] in strange odors, discoloration, or contamination,” researchers said in a review (link opens as a PDF) published in the Journal of Pharmaceutical and Scientific Innovation. “This reduces the shelf life of the product and degrades its quality and effectiveness once opened.”
So, despite the luxurious look, eye cream from a jar may actually be less effective and full of germs after only one use. But don’t give up on all eye creams just yet.
Schaffer suggests this alternative: “You want to make sure it comes in an airless tube.”
The researchers agreed. “… The danger of contamination and degradation is almost non-existent for airless packaging,” they said.

3. SPF Nail Polish

Obviously, proper sun care is very important. As dermatologist Fayne Frey, MD, explained to HealthyWay, you are exposed to the sun’s rays every day, even while walking to your mailbox or driving during the daytime.
Because of this, you should definitely make sure a chemical sunscreen (which will absorb the potentially harmful UV rays) or a physical sunscreen (which will block the UV rays entirely by reflecting them off your skin) is part of your everyday regimen.

Other safe sun tips include staying away from tanning beds, wearing baseball caps and long-sleeved shirts or UV-protective outfits, and wearing sunglasses to protect your eyes from UV rays.
What you don’t need? SPF nail polish.
While the sun can certainly burn the skin under your nails if the rays are strong enough, regular nail polish should act as a good enough barrier. Just make sure you pay attention to your hands and nails when applying sunscreen: If you’re already wearing nail polish, some chemical sunscreens can ruin your manicure, cosmetic chemist Joseph Cincotta told Allure.

4. Tanning Beds

Tanning beds are a scam (even though they technically do give you a tan) simply because they are dangerous to use.
Tanning beds give off UVA and UVB radiation, which can cause adverse effects, including increased cancer risks. According to the American Academy of Dermatology (AAD), “Researchers estimate that indoor tanning may cause upwards of 400,000 cases of skin cancer in the U.S. each year.”

What’s more, according to the AAD: One single session in a tanning bed can increase your risk of developing squamous cell carcinoma by 67 percent, basal cell carcinoma by 29 percent, and melanoma by 20 percent.
Despite these risks, the AAD estimates that 7.8 million adult women in the United States tan indoors.
The safest way to get a sun-kissed glow is to get a spray tan, or use fake tanning lotion. And if you are low on vitamin D, the AAD recommends eating foods like fatty fish, cheese, and fortified cereals, drinking orange juice, or looking into vitamin D supplements.

5. Split End Repair Serum

Split ends—when individual strands of hair separate at the ends into two or more pieces—are caused by hair damage from heat tools, over-brushing, or chemical dyes.
You can prevent split ends by getting enough protein in your diet, avoiding heat tools and excessive hair handling whenever possible, and brushing your hair gently, among other healthy hair habits. But once you have them, forget about fixing them with expensive serums or oils.

Sadly, products that claim to repair split ends really don’t work. They can temporarily glue the split ends back together until your next shampoo, or add moisture to conceal and prevent further split ends, but they can’t actually repair your hair.
“Once your ends are split, the only solution is to go to the salon to get them trimmed,” WebMD explained.

6. Stretch Mark Creams

Stretch marks are incredibly common. They are caused by tearing in a layer of the skin called the dermis and are especially likely to occur during puberty or pregnancy, when the body is growing.
“Stretch marks are caused by the skin rapidly pulling to accommodate weight gain, growth, or stretching from other causes,” says Jennifer Caudle, DO, a board-certified family physician. “Genetics can play a role, and certain medications can as well. Stretch marks may fade somewhat over time, but they are generally considered to be permanent.”

Though stretch marks can vary in appearance, some people don’t like the way they look and seek to get rid of them. Unfortunately, topical creams that claim to treat stretch marks usually don’t do much to help.
Some clinical trials suggest that certain creams help decrease the appearance of stretch marks, but more than likely won’t eliminate them. The Mayo Clinic explains, “Products made of cocoa butter, vitamin E and glycolic acid, for example, aren’t harmful, but they probably won’t help much either.”
Caudle agrees: “Many over-the-counter creams claim to remove stretch marks, but they usually provide moisture without a proven benefit of stretch mark removal. For treatment options that may help reduce the appearance of stretch marks, it’s best to talk with your doctor.”

7. Sheet Masks

Sheet masks have become insanely popular over the past few years, to the point where it’s not unusual to see people using them on airplanes. But experts are divided on whether they actually work.
The point of sheet masks is to hold the mask close to the wearer’s face and trap moisture, aiding in absorption. Effectiveness depends on the active ingredients in a sheet mask.
However, even when those ingredients are beneficial, does the paper mask itself actually make any difference in how well they work when applied to your face?

Paula Begoun, the Cosmetics Cop, doesn’t think so.
“Sheet masks don’t deliver ingredients to the skin any better than well-formulated skin-care products,” she said in a recent interview with The Cut. In fact, she considers them a waste of time. She explained that absorption depends on the molecular size of the ingredients, not on something holding those ingredients to the skin. So all those single-use sheets are fairly useless.
You can get the same (or better) results by investing in a good leave-on face cream. It will last longer and, as Begoun emphasized, allow you to make better use of your time.

8. Bee Pollen Weight-Loss Products

Bee pollen weight-loss products have been touted by some health experts as a quick way to shed pounds. These products are made from the pollen bees collect from flowers and feed to their larvae. Sellers make grand (unsubstantiated) claims about the supposed benefits of these products, which can include anything from quick weight loss to increased longevity.
Scientists are still researching the effectiveness of these products, but some bee pollen products have already proven themselves dangerous and deadly.

“Some bee pollen products marketed for weight loss have been found to contain hidden and potentially dangerous ingredients that may be harmful for people who have conditions such as irregular heartbeat, high blood pressure, and bipolar disorders,” said Gary Coody, the FDA national health fraud coordinator, in a consumer update.
Over 50 people have reported adverse health effects, including renal failure and anaphylactic shock, after using bee pollen weight-loss products—and shockingly, one person has died.
“It is tempting to believe that a quick and effortless weight loss supplement is safe for use,” FDA regulatory manager Jason Humbert said. “But given the fact that these products contain a hidden dangerous ingredient, consumers should avoid taking them.”

9. Gold-Infused Face Creams

We totally understand the appeal of gold face creams; they’re slightly shiny, they leave you feeling moisturized, and they contain real specks of gold. What’s not to love?
For starters, the price tags. Real gold is expensive, and facial creams that include precious metals aren’t ideal for budget-conscious consumers. Some gold-infused eye creams and moisturizers cost upwards of $200. More importantly, gold doesn’t do anything to improve skin health.

“At best, [gold skin creams] do nothing, and at worst, they can give you irritation of the skin,” dermatologist Judith Hellman told The New York Times in 2010. “I would tell people to put that money into gold that they can wear around their neck or on their fingers.”
While some other doctors note that gold may have anti-inflammatory properties that could potentially provide a real-world benefit, we couldn’t find any research supporting that claim in relation to skincare.

10. Bee Venom Lip Plumpers

Ever notice that your favorite limp plumper makes your lips hurt? That’s by design.
The fastest way to increase the size of body tissue—to “plump” up—is to cause irritation. That’s exactly what plumping glosses and lipsticks do; most contain cinnamon, peppermint oil, capsicum (an extract from peppers), and other mild irritants, which draw blood flow to wherever you apply them. You might notice your lips stinging for a while, and repeated use can cause your lips to dry out or crack.

Those are annoying side effects, but they’re relatively minor, and hey, sometimes you’re willing to put up with a little pain in the name of beauty. We’re not here to judge, but know this: Some lip plumpers use stronger ingredients, including products derived from bee venom (Kourtney Kardashian endorsed one such product, because of course she did).
If you’re prone to allergic reactions, make sure to avoid these glosses. And if you’re not, still be wary. Some dermatologists don’t recommend any irritating products, but if you really crave that fuller pout, stick with the peppermint- or capsicum-based products. Oh, and use them with moderation—nobody likes cracked lips, even if they do look rather plump.

11. Collagen Supplements (Maybe)

Your body uses collagen to grow skin, hair, and fingernails. Give your body more collagen, and you’ll have better hair, skin, and fingernails—it makes sense, doesn’t it?
Unfortunately, there’s not much evidence to show that collagen supplements do much of anything. While a few studies have shown that regular supplements can improve skin collagen density, moisture, and elasticity, those studies used small sample sizes…and tended to be sponsored by the companies making those supplements.

“I don’t think that I am in a position to pooh-pooh it and say this definitely doesn’t work,” Diane S. Berson, associate professor of dermatology at Weill Cornell Medical College, told The New York Times in 2018. “But as a physician, I would want to see more evidence-backed science.”
Another issue: In many of the studies, participants took relatively large amounts of collagen, so to get the same possible benefits, you’d have to take six pills per day or pay upwards of $40 per month for powdered collagen. Again, there’s not a ton of evidence showing that the supplements actually have a noticeable effect, so that’s a lot of effort for limited benefits.
And as we’ve covered in other pieces, many supplements contain far less of their active ingredients than the amount listed on their labels. If you do decide to supplement, make sure you trust the source—and don’t count on breathtaking results.

12. Activated Charcoal Foods

Emergency responders use activated charcoal to treat patients who have consumed poison or overdosed on medications. It’s effective at sucking out toxins, allowing them to harmlessly pass through the gastrointestinal tract.
But while charcoal is incredibly effective in some emergency scenarios, it’s not the type of thing you want to take regularly—despite what manufacturers say. Charcoal is said to whiten teeth, brighten skin, and reduce bloating, but physicians are skeptical of those claims.

The reason: Activated charcoal absorbs toxins, but when you’re not actively treating a toxin, there’s really no reason to use it.
“Our bodies have the ability to detox ourselves,” Kristin Kirkpatrick, manager of wellness nutrition services at Cleveland Clinic’s Wellness Institute, told TODAY. “That is the majority of the role of the liver … it does so much of the detoxing.”
Activated charcoal might make prescription drugs less effective, and it can draw out many important vitamins and minerals.
With all of that said, some charcoal skin products (yes, including sheet masks) look cool and feel great, and if you like them, that’s enough of a reason to keep using them. Topical applications of charcoal won’t hurt you—they just won’t suck out “impurities” or “toxins” that aren’t there. Some of those peel-off charcoal skin products are effective at removing blackheads, but many aren’t.
Still, if you use them in moderation, they’re far from the worst treatment on this list. Just be sure to skip those charcoal-infused foods at your local health food store.

13. “Slugging”

“Slugging” involves covering your face with a thin layer of petroleum jelly before you head to bed at night. It gets its name because…well, it makes you feel like a slug. Proponents of the therapy swear by it.
“My face has never been so soft,” Reddit user trainbangled wrote after trying slugging. “I am reborn. I am a new woman. I was not a slug; I was a caterpillar in the cocoon.”
We’re glad that the slug life worked out for her, but dermatologists aren’t sold on the technique. While petroleum jelly can keep moisture from escaping from your skin, it can also plug your pores, causing breakouts.

“Dermatologists already know that people who use greasy hair waxes or gels tend to breakout more along the hairline, so it is highly likely that slugging would do the same to the whole face,” dermatologist Justine Kluk told Women’s Health.
Other physicians echoed that sentiment.
“I would never recommend this as a first line of treatment to my patients,” dermatologist Steven Swengel told NewBeauty. “Although it is an inexpensive way to hydrate the skin, there is a potential risk for acne prone skin. Pure occlusion can set off some bad outbreaks so this method should be used with caution.”
The consensus seems to be that if you’re considering this therapy, you should talk to your dermatologist first. Other treatments might give you the same results without putting your skin at risk.

14. Sunscreen Pills

Applying sunscreen is a lot of work. Well, okay, not really, but some people don’t like slathering themselves in SPF 30 before spending a few hours at the beach. There’s got to be a better way…right?
Enter sunscreen pills, which are exactly what they sound like: capsules intended to shield consumers from harmful UV rays. The keyword in that last sentence is “intended,” since sunscreen pills don’t work. In fact, several were cited by the FDA for making misleading claims.

“Consumers should be watchful for unscrupulous companies making unproven claims,” FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said in a May 2018 statement. “When the FDA sees companies taking advantage of people’s desire to protect themselves from the harmful effects of the sun—we’ll step in. There’s no pill or capsule that can replace your sunscreen.”
Nevertheless, we found several “sun skin care” pills from several different manufacturers with a few seconds of Googling (we’re not linking them here to avoid giving them additional traffic). Companies typically claim that their supplements contain ingredients like Polypodium leucotomus, which is said to decrease the damage that UV rays cause to skin cells.
That extract might actually protect skin from the sun when taken regularly in high enough quantities, but more research is needed, and as we mentioned a few paragraphs ago, the supplement market isn’t exactly highly regulated. Until your dermatologist recommends a “sun pill,” stick with the lotions.

15. BB Creams

BB (or “Beauty Balm”) creams claim to combine moisturizer, sunscreen, and makeup into one easy-to-apply product. That’s an appealing concept—if you can apply one pea-sized amount of a single cream and head out the door, you’ll certainly save a lot of time.
Unfortunately, while these balms are safe and useful, they’re not a complete replacement for the aforementioned products.

“BB Creams are a brilliant marketing concept, however, ‘one cream that fits all’ is a false notion,” dermatologist Dr. Harold Lancer told HuffPost. “There is some modest benefit-moisturizing, but should not be the end all of the fountain of youth and certainly should not replace any other vital steps in skincare.”
The issue is that BB creams vary greatly in terms of their ingredients and efficacy. That’s not a big deal, except when it comes to the sunscreen component. Remember, you really, really need appropriate protection if you’re spending time outdoors, and a pea-sized amount of anything probably isn’t doing the job. If you decide to use BB creams, research them carefully (and consider adding a dedicated sunscreen with an appropriate SPF rating).

Protect yourself.

There are tons of treatments and products out there that truly work and are worth spending your money on. Other products, like these, are total scams, with marketing campaigns designed to appeal to people’s insecurities.
So how can you tell if something is worth trying or not? First, see if you can find trustworthy reviews. Then, if the product or treatment makes grand claims, check the clinical trial registry, find out if the claims are linked to any peer-reviewed research, or see if a licensed medical doctor recommends the treatment. Generally, the more scientific experimentation and backing a product or treatment has, the more likely it is to be the real deal.

Ultimately, if you’re not sure that something is effective or safe, you should avoid using it. Better to be safe than sorry!

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13 Body Hacks, Evaluated: What Science Says About Shortcuts To Health And Wellness

Post author By HealthyWay Staff Writer
Post date December 3, 2019

We hate to say it, but at this point in our lives, we’re starting to accept the fact that we’ll never become superheroes. We’re stuck with boring human bodies without adamantium claws, laser eyes, or any of the other awesome anatomical features we’ve been praying for since we were six (we’re 30 now, by the way—not that that matters).

The good news is that, thanks to the internet, we’ve learned about dozens of “life hacks,” purportedly backed by science, that will let us unlock the secrets of our (horrible, boring) bodies. The bad news is that some of those hacks are, well, slightly misleading.
We decided to take a closer look at some of the stranger examples floating around the internet. Some of them are pretty awesome body hacks—others are more like “writing hacks.”

1. Looking at the color green can make you more creative.

Need to sit down and write an essay? Looking for inspiration for your latest play? Are you a professional wrestler and you’re running out of fresh ideas for your armbar? Just look at a big green rectangle, and you’ll somehow trick your brain into jump-starting its creativity circuits, hackers purport.

This hack actually has some basis in science. A 2012 study published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin showed that the color green can aid creative tasks, although the authors were careful to note that the effect was limited. Researchers provided study participants with a “brief glimpse of green,” then asked them to perform various “creativity challenges.”
For instance, in one experiment, participants were asked to come up with various uses for a tin can, at which point their responses were graded by a tester. Participants who saw a green rectangle performed more creatively than those who saw a white rectangle.

“Green may serve as a cue that evokes the motivation to strive for improvement and task mastery, which in turn may facilitate growth,” researcher Stephanie Lichtenfeld, PhD, said in a 2012 interview.
However, Lichtenfeld also characterized the effect as subtle. If you’re really looking to boost your creativity, you’re better off building a creative routine, according to the American Psychological Association. You’ll also want to minimize stress, get plenty of sleep, and collaborate with others—if you want to do so in an all-green room, all the better.

2. Rubbing “pressure points” on your body can prevent migraines.

This hack comes from a piece on Livestrong, which references some…unscientific sources. It’s based on pressure point therapy, a somewhat dubious interpretation of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), and an ebook that apparently came from an online health food store (not exactly the New England Journal of Medicine).
Activating those “pressure points” can actually reduce the symptoms of a migraine, and some researchers recommend massage and acupuncture (another pressure-therapy) as a first-line course of treatment for migraine sufferers.

However, there are some crucial caveats. For starters, we’re not really sure if pressure point therapy really needs the, uh, pressure points. One study notes that the positive effects “can be achieved even if point selection is not as dogmatic and precise as proposed by the Chinese system.” Rather than trying to find the one inch of your body that holds all of your Chi, you might be able to just rub for a while and get the same results.
And since the placebo effect is more pronounced in people suffering from migraine pain, it’s also possible that pressure-point therapies provide a sort of enhanced placebo effect. One study found that trigger-point massage, while effective at limiting migraine pain, was no more effective than a placebo.
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If you suffer from migraines, you’re better off increasing your intake of folic acid, getting regular exercise, and seeing a physician if the headaches are occurring regularly. Don’t expect to cure severe headaches simply by rubbing the webbing between your fingers—but with that said, if you feel like rubbing your finger-webs, go for it. You’re not doing any damage.
Oh, and while we’re on the subject of possible placebos…

3. Use placebos to cure…lots of things.

Placebos aren’t just sugar pills. Well, okay, they are just sugar pills, but they’re powerful medicine.
“The placebo effect is more than positive thinking—believing a treatment or procedure will work,” explained Professor Ted Kaptchuk of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in a piece published on Harvard Health. “It’s about creating a stronger connection between the brain and body and how they work together.”

Kaptchuk’s research shows that placebos can be just as effective as other medical treatments. You’ve probably heard about that concept—it’s extremely well documented.
What you might not know is that the placebo effect has its own placebo effect; oddly enough, some placebos work even when people know that they’re placebos.
“People can still get a placebo response, even though they know they are on a placebo,” Kaptchuk said. “You don’t need deception or concealment for many conditions to get a significant and meaningful placebo effect.”
In one of his studies, Kaptchuk gave patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) “open-label” placebos. Half of the study’s volunteers received the pills and were explicitly told that they were in the placebo group, while half of them received nothing at all. The group who received the placebos experienced a “dramatic and significant improvement” in their symptoms.

How could that possibly work? Kaptchuk has some theories.
“People associate the ritual of taking medicine as a positive healing effect,” he said. “Even if they know it’s not medicine, the action itself can stimulate the brain into thinking the body is being healed.”
So, how can you turn this information into a superpower? Well, you can’t gain Wolverine-like healing abilities simply by scarfing down some sugar pills, but if you’ve got a condition in which pain or stress is a factor, try taking a harmless supplement and telling yourself that you’re treating the condition. As dumb as that might sound, the research shows that open-label placebos can work.
Oh, and if the placebo doesn’t do the trick, be sure to see an actual physician. Seriously. Don’t trust your health to some advice you read in an internet article.

4. Bend over in a chair to get rid of the hiccups.

We know, we know—everyone’s got a hiccup cure. We’ve seen cures that include rubbing parts of your hand, covering your mouth, and chugging pickle juice.
Those cures might be effective for some people. If you want a really powerful hiccup cure, however, you’ve got to turn to a neuroscientist.

Why are hiccups even a thing??? I must find a cure

— imboolin (@youngrananu) June 10, 2018

“For non-pathological hiccups, there’s a really easy way to cure them for 99 percent of the population,” James Giordano, PhD, professor in neurology and biochemistry at Georgetown University Medical Center, told Urbo. “You want to sit down and bend forward at the waist, and I mean really bend forward… Then, drink a room-temperature, non-carbonated fluid for 10 seconds straight, or 8-10 swallows of fluid. Stay in that position until you’re finished, then slowly sit up.”
Why does that work? Hiccups are caused by excessive stimulation to the upper part of your digestive tract, including the soft palate, the top of the throat, and the top of the stomach. Giordano explains that his method overwhelms the spasm, allowing your muscles to relax.

“It’s sort of a neurological override,” he says. “The swallowing reflex requires coordination of a number of different nerves, and you’re literally overcoming the spasm by super-coordinating a pattern response.”
Of course, excessive hiccuping can be a symptom of a more serious condition, so if your hiccups don’t disappear in a few hours, you might want to see your physician.

5. Tweak your walking technique to burn more calories.

Walking has to be the best exercise of them all—if you can count walking as an exercise, that is. Running is hard on the knees. Lifting weights is just plain hard. But walking? Heck, we do that every day.
Good news: Fitness motivation site Super Skinny Me says you can burn plenty of calories during a nice, relaxing walk, provided you know how to walk the right way. But the site only cites itself; all of its links are internal. So is this welcome exercise tip too good to be true?

At first glance, Super Skinny Me’s prescription for strolling passes the common-sense test. They say you should boost your walking speed until your heart-rate monitor tells you your heartbeat is up to 65 to 85 percent of your maximum beats per minute. They recommend pumping your arms, weighing yourself down, and taking a hilly route. All of those things require more exertion, so it makes sense that they’d burn more calories.
But what do the doctors have to say about walking as exercise?
It’s a go, particularly for folks who aren’t used to being active, according to the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK). Walking can help you burn calories and lower your risk of high blood pressure and heart disease. But Super Skinny Me definitely got one thing right: In order to get the most benefits, you’ll need to keep your pace pretty brisk.

The NIDDK recommends 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise per week. Walk fast enough to increase your heart rate, and you’re there. So while you don’t have to learn new walking techniques to burn calories, you do have to move faster than a shuffle. Try walking quickly for 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week. If that doesn’t help you meet your weight-loss goals, double your walking time to an hour per day, according to the NIDDK’s recommendations.

6. Refresh quickly with a “coffee nap.”

More than a third of Americans don’t get enough sleep on a regular basis. If you count yourself among them, we’ve got good news (sort of): You can get an extra burst of energy by consuming caffeine and taking a quick nap.

Okay, when we put it that way, it sounds sort of obvious. “Drink coffee and nap to get energy” isn’t exactly groundbreaking advice. However, scientific research suggests that the technique is more effective than other methods, and the “coffee nap” trend has been promoted by dozens of sites, including HuffPost.
Here’s the deal: Caffeine fits into your brain’s adenosine receptors. Adenosine naturally accumulates during normal brain activity and makes you feel tired, and when caffeine fills some of those receptors, you’re less capable of getting drowsy. Sleeping, on the other hand, naturally clears out adenosine. Drink a cup of coffee, then nap for 20 minutes, and your body will clear out some adenosine just as the caffeine makes its way to your brain.

Sleep longer, though, and the effect won’t work as well, since you’ll enter the deeper stages of sleep (when that happens, your body needs more time to recover). Various scientific studies have established this effect, so this “hack” is actually supported by evidence.
With that said, sleep is an incredibly complex process—so complex that scientists don’t really understand why we sleep—so your mileage might vary. Even so, it’s worth a try. If you’re suffering from midday drowsiness, try chugging a cup of coffee and laying down for a short rest. Just make sure to set an alarm, or all of your coffee-chugging effort will be for naught.

7. Improve your brainpower by chewing gum.

Ever hear someone say that a person “is so dumb, he can’t walk and chew gum at the same time?” There might be something to that (plus, it’s a sick burn). Some research suggests that chewing gum affects cognitive abilities, though the extent of the effect is disputed.

In a 2011 study published in the scientific journal Appetite, participants saw significant improvements in their test-taking abilities when chewing gum. Researchers theorize that because chewing gum sends more blood to the brain for about 15-20 minutes, it actually enhances our ability to think.
Of course, that was only one study, so it’s important to take it with a grain of salt (and a stick of Juicy Fruit). We’re not quite sure whether we can classify this as a functional life hack, and we’re even more critical of the other purported effects of chewing gum.

For instance, several sites, including Cracked, have suggested that the habit can dramatically improve reading speeds by eliminating “subvocalization.” The idea behind the hack is that your brain tries to vocalize words as you read them, and when your mouth’s already occupied, it skips this step.
That seems logical to us, and given the study referenced above, we’re sure that some people read more quickly when they’re chewing gum, but we couldn’t find any scientific research showing that the effect has anything to do with subvocalization. Go ahead and try using gum to enhance your brainpower—it certainly couldn’t hurt, provided that you choose a sugar-free product.

8. Study more effectively by taking a quick nap.

While chewing gum might not make you a genius, napping can help you during a late-night cram session.
In 2015, a team of researchers at Saarland University performed a memory recall experiment on 41 study participants. About half of them were asked to take a brief nap after studying.

“The control group, whose members watched DVDs while the other group slept, performed significantly worse than the nap group when it came to remembering the word pairs,” professor Axel Mecklinger, who led the study, told ScienceDaily. “The memory performance of the participants who had a power nap was just as good as it was before sleeping, that is, immediately after completing the learning phase.”
Sleep plays an important role in encoding memories; our brains essentially reorganize our short-term memories while we’re resting, throwing out the useless stuff (the color of the dog you saw on your way back home) while keeping the important stuff (the speech you need to memorize for your presentation on Thursday).

“A short nap at the office or in school is enough to significantly improve learning success,” Mecklinger said. “Wherever people are in a learning environment, we should think seriously about the positive effects of sleep.”
There you have it: When your boss asks why you’re sleeping before the big meeting, you can simply explain that science told you to.

9. See in the dark (and in the light) by keeping one eye closed.

This one comes from Reddit, and it’s one of the simplest hacks on this list…and, oddly enough, one of the most effective.

“If you’re like me, sometimes you have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night,” Reddit user jbondhus2002 wrote. Why, yes, jbondhus2002, we are like you.
“[When] you do, keep one eye closed if you need to turn a light on. When you turn the light off, open your closed eye, [and it] will be able to see without much light. It’s a really cool trick—and makes you aware of how awesome your body is!”

This one’s pretty easy to explain. In a dark room, your pupils expand in order to capture as much light as possible. When the lights are on, your pupils contract. By covering one eye, you keep one pupil contracted and one dilated, and by switching between them, you can see in either environment.
Some Reddit users suggested that this is the reason that pirates wore eyepatches. Sailors had to move from dark cabins to the bright outdoors regularly, so they’d simply switch their eyepatch when going from one area to another. Mythbusters actually tested this idea and found it plausible, but the show noted that there aren’t any historical sources to support the idea that pirates actually wore eyepatches in the first place.

10. Clear a stuffy nose with a simple trick.

According to a video from Prevention Magazine, you can clear a stuffy nose by pressing your tongue to the roof of your mouth while pressing on the middle of your forehead. Alternate between pressing the two spots (one with your tongue, the other with your finger). If you’re having trouble visualizing that, here’s the video.

One Reddit user suggested that this works by moving the vomer bone, which separates the left and right nasal cavities. Your sinuses loosen, the gunk gets released (sorry for the visual), and you’re able to breathe clear again.
There are plenty of anecdotes about this trick working, but we couldn’t find any scientific studies backing it up. Additionally, that explanation about the vomer bone might not be completely accurate. Another Redditor, this one claiming to be a doctor, replied that the vomer isn’t supposed to move and that it’s more likely that the simple muscular activity of the nasopharynx (which connects the nose to the throat) loosens everything up.

Even if this trick is the real deal, you probably won’t get too much relief, since you’re not treating the cause of your symptoms; you’re only easing the pressure for a few moments, and it will build back up fairly quickly. Still, it’s a nice life hack to keep in mind during flu season.

11. Use your right ear to hone in on conversations from far away.

You’re at a party, and you’re trying to hear someone over the music. You can’t quite make out what they’re saying, even though they’re yelling. Not to worry: Turn your right ear toward them, and you’ll magically hear what they’re saying.
This hack comes from a variety of sites, including BBC News, and it’s totally legitimate, even if it doesn’t quite rise to the level of “superpower.” It’s supported by research published by the Acoustical Society of America, and we just tried it out—in loud environments, your right ear is much better at hearing speech. What gives?

When a sound enters your right ear, it’s processed by the left side of the brain, which is generally responsible for speech and language development. If you’re listening to speech, you’ll typically have an easier time using your right ear than your left, though we should note that brain organization is complicated—some people process speech on the right sides of their brains, and some people use both hemispheres.
This is an especially useful hack for younger people, as young brains don’t have well-developed listening tools. Kids have trouble separating different auditory information, but as they age, they’re able to separate audio more effectively.

12. Hold your breath longer by intentionally hyperventilating.

Yeah, yeah, we know—this one doesn’t seem intuitive. It also seems incredibly dangerous. As LifeHacker reports, magician David Blaine claimed that he used this trick to hold his breath underwater for 17 minutes.
“The buildup of CO2 in your lungs can get just as painful as the lack of oxygen,” Blaine explained. “Purge as much as you can before you begin. Repeatedly exhale and inhale. Hard. Imagine you’re trying to blow a toy sailboat away from you.”

He’s not totally wrong. Hyperventilating can improve your ability to hold your breath; with less CO2 in your body, you’re able to stay calm and suppress your natural instinct to take a breath.
Before you try this technique, though, you should understand that it can be extremely dangerous in certain situations. Intentional hyperventilation allows you to feel less pain as you hold your breath, but it doesn’t actually put more oxygen at your disposal.

13. Banish the call of nature by scratching your leg.

Back in 2006, Australian newspaper the Sydney Morning Herald published a bizarre little story with the headline “Leg scratch ‘controls’ women’s loo call.” The story popularized advice from a physiotherapist named Janetta Webb, who said that women can ease the pressure of a full bladder by giving the back of the leg a hearty scratch.
Since then, this body hack has been picked up by a number of sites, including Lifehacker. There’s just one problem, and it’s the obvious one: Even Webb herself isn’t too confident the trick will work long enough to do much good.

“If you scratch or rub the back of your calf for a few moments, really vigorously, you may interrupt the message from your bladder to your brain just long enough for you to make it to the toilet.”
Webb told the reporter that the only real way to stop the leaks is to strengthen the pelvic floor through special exercises. Add that to the fact that, when she was interviewed for the article, Webb was working on a program to boost consciousness about continence problems and their cures. Could she have come up with the theory in an early bid for viral attention?

We don’t know, but we wouldn’t recommend holding it in if you’ve got the option. That can stress your bladder muscles, leading to urinary retention (in other words, you’re not fully able to urinate). That’s a potentially serious medical condition. Your best bet is to truck it to the bathroom when you need to go—and save the leg scratching for when your leg itches.
If there’s a lesson in all of this, it’s that some life hacks are sheer hackery. If you can call any beneficial behavior a life hack, which it seems you can, here’s our favorite: Do your research.

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Tru Storys: The Costliest Typos Of All Time

Post author By HealthyWay Staff Writer
Post date November 21, 2019

A simple typo can have massive consequences.
Mistakes happen. Most of the time, they don’t really affect things in a meaningful way—you might be slightly embarrassed if you misspell a few words or swap out some homonyms, but you probably won’t suffer too terribly. Hey, everyone screws up; you forgive, forget, and move on.
That’s not always the case. Just ask Lynne Lambert. Her company, NYC Subway Line, is a small business that assigns data entry duties to a single employee. Accuracy is crucial because each invoice represents a fairly significant portion of the company’s revenue. A mistake can have serious ramifications, even if it appears fairly innocuous.
“We had a person in that job who would swing from very good to terrible within a day,” Lambert says. “One day, we discovered two errors on invoices she’d made for our biggest customer. I pointed them out and asked [her] to correct them, then resend the invoices via email with an apology.”

Lambert checked up on the employee later to make sure that she’d followed through.
“The invoice was correct, but the note said, ‘We are sorry for the incontinence,'” Lambert recalls. Flabbergasted, she pointed out the mistake to the employee, who blamed it on spellcheck (probably an appropriate explanation, since if it wasn’t a misspelling…well, never mind). She gave the employee another chance.
“She then sent the corrected invoice with the exact same note within two minutes of the first,” Lambert says. “That’s when I knew she was out of chances. We had to let her go.”

In a sense, Lambert was fortunate. While that typo cost an employee her job, the most significant typos in history have had more far-reaching consequences. We looked into the stories behind a few of the most costly typographical errors of all time.

1. A missing hyphen destroyed a NASA spacecraft.

In 1962, NASA launched Mariner 1, a spacecraft intended to fly by Venus and send vital scientific data back to Earth on its infinite journey into the cosmos. Instead, it veered off course, forcing a safety officer to detonate it about five minutes after launch.
A review board later determined that a missing hyphen in the Mariner 1’s coded instructions played a major role in the disaster. The typo caused an issue with the spacecraft’s tracking mechanism.

If you’re picturing some programmer missing a key while setting up the Mariner 1’s software, that’s not exactly the case; at the time, NASA coded computers with punch cards. The hyphen—referred to as a “bar” in NASA’s parlance—should have told the computer to ignore veering movements resulting from a radio guidance failure without attempting to correct course.
The “bar” had been missing from other successful flights that relied on the same software, but radio failure compounded the problem for the Mariner 1. In other words, the missing hyphen wasn’t the only issue with this spaceflight, just the most significant preventable error.

“[The radio guidance failure combined with the missing hyphen] caused the computer to swing automatically into a series of unnecessary course corrections with erroneous steering commands, which finally threw the spacecraft off course,” NASA wrote.
Fortunately, the Mariner 1 was an unmanned mission. Still, the error cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $80 million—in 1962. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $663 million today. That’s a lot of money for a single hyphen.

2. In 1988, an unfortunate typo led to a $10 million lawsuit.

The plaintiff: Gloria Quinan, owner of the Banner Travel agency in Sonoma, California. She placed an ad in the Yellow Pages, but as you might have guessed if you paid attention to the title of this article, the phone book’s copy editor apparently skipped a day.
The ad was supposed to advertise “exotic travel.” Instead, it promoted “erotic travel.” To some tourists, that’s certainly an intriguing offer, but it wasn’t the type of promotion that Banner Travel had intended to promote.
According to The Los Angeles Times, Quinan says she developed severe health issues due to stress from the misprinted ad. She claimed that her business was effectively ruined. Unsurprisingly, the defendant, Pacific Bell, declined to comment (though we’re sure they offered a sexy, sexy apology at some point).

”Her older clients, which was most of her business, want to avoid her now,” Quinan’s attorney, George Altenberg, told the Associated Press.
In accordance with California law, the records regarding the case were destroyed—understandable, given its age—so we’re not sure of the outcome. Regardless, it wasn’t great press for Pacific Bell, and it certainly wasn’t great press for the Banner Travel agency. We’re sure it also disappointed a few frisky travelers.

3. New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority launched a memorable advertising campaign in 2013.

That year, the MTA was forced to dispose of up to $250,000 worth of new subway maps. The reason? They didn’t display accurate fare information.
“[The MTA] is very embarrassed about this,” an anonymous source told The New York Post at the time. “They were frantically calling the booths, trying to get these maps back.”
The maps listed minimum prices for pay-per-ride cards as $4.50 instead of $5. That’s a minor mistake, right? Not quite. The entire purpose of the campaign was to print maps with accurate pricing.

“They weren’t coming out with a new map because they were changing the map,” said Paul Flores, an MTA station agent, in 2013. “They were coming out with a new map because they were changing the price. That was the sole purpose. And they couldn’t even get that right.”
How does that sort of mistake happen? You’d think that someone would catch the typo during the printing process.
“When a document is extremely important, it goes through hundreds of hands,” says James, a freelance copy editor who recently edited the quarterly report for a Fortune 100 company. “You essentially have to edit the document while it’s being printed, and that’s not an exaggeration.”

“Ironically, we see more of these mistakes with massive campaigns since everyone assumes that someone else has looked over the document—or in this case, the map.”
By MTA union estimates, 80,000 incorrect maps were erroneously printed.

4. Back in 1631, a misprinted Bible ruined its publishers’ lives…and gave readers some terrible advice.

Religious typos are particularly unfortunate because the mistakes can ruin important messages. This Easter, for example, a UK church printed a celebratory banner that hadn’t been through spellcheck. It reportedly read: “Chris is Risen.” That’s great news for Chris, we suppose, but it was a massive waste of money for the church.
Still, that embarrassing blunder pales in comparison to an infamous 17th-century printing error. Royal publishers Robert Barker and Martin Lucas sent out 1,000 copies of the Bible without noticing a fairly striking misprint: When listing the seventh of the Ten Commandments, the book left out the word “not.”

The resulting verse read “Thou shalt commit adultery.”
The Anglican Church wasn’t thrilled, as the Bible was intended to represent the faith of the royalty. King Charles I ordered the Bibles destroyed, but several survived the censorship. Recently, The Telegraph reported that one of 10 known copies of the “Wicked Bible” went to auction and was expected to sell for around $21,000; it sold for about $44,000.

History has known worse typos. As here in the Wicked Bible. pic.twitter.com/zXJxV56pIE

— David Drew (@NHSwhistleblowr) March 19, 2018

Unfortunately, the publishers didn’t fare so well. They lost their printing license and faced heavy fines for their mistake. According to one text, the Archbishop of Canterbury said:
“I knew the time when great care was had about printing, the Bibles especially. Good compositors and the best correctors were gotten being grave and learned men, the paper and letter rare and fair, every way of the best. But now the paper is nought, the composers boys, and the correctors unlearned.”
That’s the 17th-century equivalent of saying, “Your Bible is bad, your editing is bad, and you should feel bad.”

5. An erroneous trade nearly ruined a major banking firm.

Granted, we’re not usually interested in stories of corporate stock trading, but try to put yourself in the shoes of a Mizuho Securities employee in December 2005.

The company attempted to sell 610,000 shares of J-COM Co., Ltd., a staffing services company, at one yen each. That was an amazing deal—at the time, a single share of J-COM went for 610,000 yen. The issue compounded throughout the day, eventually resulting in estimated losses of 27 billion yen (roughly $255 million).
As you might have guessed, someone at Mizuho Securities had attempted to sell a single share for 610,000 yen, but somehow, the values for “value” and “number of stocks” switched. The error probably occurred due to an issue with the firm’s electronic trading system, and in 2009, a court determined that the Tokyo Stock Exchange was 70 percent liable for the mistake.
That wasn’t the only time a human error created a massive disaster on the stock market. In 1994, Chilean stockbroker Juan Pablo Davila lost his company $30 million when he accidentally entered a trade as “buy” instead of “sell” on his computer. In an attempt to rectify his mistake, Davila made additional (unauthorized) trades…and lost $175 million by the end of the day.
Davila served three years in prison for his catastrophic series of bad decisions, and today, the word “davilar” is part of the Spanish language. Its meaning: “to botch things up royally.”

6. An extra comma cost the United States government millions of dollars.

What do you do if you’re a major government and you’re recovering from, oh, a massive Civil War?

If you answered “tariffs,” congratulations, you’re the United States during Reconstruction (also, how are you reading this article?). The Tariff Act of 1872 was intended to restore the economy by changing some of the taxes on imported goods. It was a crucial piece of legislation, since the United States didn’t have a federal income tax at the time; in some years, tariffs provided for up to 95 percent of the federal budget.

The Ulysses S. Grant administration enacted the Tariff Act of 1872 to reduce rates on manufactured goods while maintaining other tariffs. Unfortunately, it included an enormous error: an extra comma.

Like previous tariff acts, the legislation had an extensive list of duty-free products. People wouldn’t have to pay taxes when importing these items. Here’s the important line that made its way into the act:
“[Exempted from the tax are] Fruit, plants tropical and semi-tropical for the purpose of propagation or cultivation.”

The language was supposed to read “fruit plants,” referring to plants that were imported specifically to grow in the United States. Because the comma made its way into the document, however, all fruits were exempted from tariffs—and imported fruits were big business. When importers noticed the error, they pounced (and here, we’re using “pounced” to mean “slowly litigated their case in a boring legal way that probably doesn’t need much further explanation”).
In total, the United States was forced to refund $2 million in collected fruit tariffs, which was about 0.65 percent of the government’s entire federal budget in 1875. Despite a public outcry, nobody could figure out how the comma made its way into the document, but needless to say, it was removed in subsequent tariff acts.

7. A car dealership sent out scratch-off tickets…and all of them were winners.

Technically, this is a printing error rather than a typo, but we think it’s painful enough to include in this list.
If you’ve ever lived in any place ever (and we’re guessing you have), you’ve probably received junk mail from car dealerships. You throw most of them away—except the scratch-off tickets. Everyone loves scratching their way to a prize, even if that prize is something lame like a free test drive or a short conversation with an oddly aggressive used car salesperson.

But for one New Mexico car dealership, the stakes were substantially higher. In 2007, Roswell Honda sent out 30,000 scratch-off tickets to local drivers—and each one was a winner. Recipients believed that they’d won a $1,000 grand prize, and within days, the dealership was swarmed by excited “winners.”
The winning tickets were, of course, not real winners; they were misprinted.
“Unfortunately, they missed it in the proofreading,” Jeff Kohn, Roswell Honda general manager, told The Associated Press.
Adding that his dealership was making a “full-faith effort” to investigate the error, Kohn said that he was able to stop 20,000 more mailers from reaching his potential customers.
“[This is] not how we portray ourselves or our community,” he said.
Kohn blamed the mistake on Atlanta-based ad agency Force Media Group, which issued a press release shortly after the mailers made the news.
“It was a printing error,” said Force Media Group spokesperson Jim Fitzpatrick. “Instead of only one ticket in 50,000 having the winning notification under the scratch‐off, they all did. We’re going to make up for that in this new sweepstakes by actually increasing both the value and number of prizes offered as well as by dramatically increasing the chances of winning. The dealer and Force looked at the situation and decided we had to make it better to make it right.”

8. An airline offered its passengers a once-in-a-lifetime fare.

In 2006, Italian airline Alitalia (try saying those last three words three times fast) offered an incredible opportunity: For only $33, travelers could fly from Toronto to Larnaca, a small resort town in Cyprus.That was a shocking discount, since business-class fares between the cities usually cost around $2,500.
Alitalia quickly sold hundreds of tickets, which would have been great news if they’d actually intended to sell them in the first place. Someone at the airline had messed up, pricing the tickets at 1 percent of their actual value.

The company suspended ticket sales within a few hours, but the damage was done. To their credit, Alitalia honored 509 of the bookings (the rest, which hadn’t been ticketed, were refunded).
“It was a human mistake,” Alitalia’s spokeswoman told The Wall Street Journal. “We hope that people will appreciate the effort we are making.”
At normal rates, the tickets would have meant about $1.32 million for the airline. Instead, Alitalia received about $16,797.

9. An extra “s” ruined a business that had operated for more than a century.

In 2009, Welsh engineering firm Taylor & Sons was doing well. The company had operated for 124 years and employed 250 people. Unfortunately, that changed rapidly thanks to a clerical error.
Companies House, the United Kingdom government institution responsible for registering businesses, reported that Taylor & Sons Ltd. had been officially dissolved. Suppliers jumped ship, customers cancelled their orders, and banks refused to issue loans to the failing business—but the business wasn’t failing. Companies House had meant to report the dissolution of Taylor & Son Ltd. (no “s”), a completely different company.
To make matters worse, Taylor & Sons managing director Philip Davison-Sebry was on vacation when the news broke, and some clients believed that he’d skipped the country.

“I felt physically sick. Back at the business the phones were ringing out, it was like Armageddon,” Davison-Sebry said. “Everyone wanted to be paid. People were queuing up for money. Equipment was being taken off site.”
“We lost all our credibility as all our suppliers thought we were in liquidation. It was like a snowball effect.”
While Companies House corrected the error three days later, the damage was done. Taylor & Sons wasn’t able to recover and officially liquidated in 2014.
“I was so close to a nervous breakdown,” Davison-Sebry said in 2015. “I was terrible with the stress of it. I could see everything disintegrating before my eyes and it was not very pleasant … I would not wish it on my worst enemy. Well, except the bloke who nicked my boat.”
The firm sued Companies House and eventually won; they’d asked for £9 million (roughly $11.6 million USD). We could not find an update on who stole Davison-Sebry’s boat.

10. An antique ale sold at auction for much, much less than it was worth.

In 1852, explorer Sir Edward Belcher led an expedition to the Arctic, and like all good 19th century explorers, he took some strong drinks with him. That included Allsopp’s Arctic Ale, specially brewed in Staffordshire, England for Belcher and his men.
These days, a pristine bottle can fetch more than $500,000 at auction—provided that you spell its name correctly. In 2007, an eBay seller made a costly mistake by listing a bottle of the stuff as “allsop’s arctic ale. full and corked with a wax seal.”

That missing “p” prevented the bottle from showing up in most collectors’ searches. A buyer named collectordan placed the winning bid of $304, then turned around and resold it on the same auction site for a whopping $503,300. We’re not sure whether or not anyone ever drank the expensive brew, but we’re guessing you don’t spend that type of money on an after-dinner drink.

11. A man was sentenced to death (partially) due to a missing word.

While the other typos on this list are serious, at least they didn’t endanger someone’s life. That’s not the case here.
In 1987, Bruce Wayne Morris (who was not Batman, as far as we can tell through cursory research) was found guilty of killing a man who picked him up while he was hitchhiking in 1985 (okay, definitely not Batman). The jury could choose between two punishments for the crime: life in prison with no possibility of parole, or a death sentence.

However, the written instructions given to the jury inaccurately said “with possibility of parole.” Jurors were left with a difficult decision; either they sentence Morris to death, or they allow for the possibility that he could eventually rejoin society. They sentenced him to execution.
That kicked off a legal battle that undoubtedly cost California taxpayers quite a bit of money. A federal court eventually reversed the sentence because it found that the mistake “is too obvious, the likelihood of prejudice too great, and the stakes are too high to conclude the error was harmless.”
Bruce Wayne Morris was freed from prison, became a billionaire, and is using his spare time to build a high-tech batsuit with…oh, actually, we typed the wrong name into Google. Bruce Wayne Morris is probably still behind bars.

12. An embarrassing typo on a ballot led to expensive reprints.

In 2006, Ottawa County in Michigan spent about $40,000 to reprint 170,000 ballots with an unfortunate spelling error in the text of a proposed amendment to the state constitution.

Here’s how the proposal should have read:
“A proposal to amend the State Constitution to ban affirmative action programs that give preferential treatment to groups or individuals based on their race, gender, color, ethnicity or national origin for public employment, education or contracting purposes.”
Granted, it’s pretty dry and boring, but that’s a competent description of the ballot measure. Unfortunately, someone left off the “l” in “public,” which, ahem, substantially changed the meaning of the sentence. The county clerk’s office had proofread the ballot several times, but somehow, the error made it through.
“It’s just one of those words,” county clerk Daniel C. Krueger said. “Even after we told people it was in there, they still read over it.”
The proposal ultimately passed, prompting a lengthy Supreme Court case questioning the ballot initiative’s constitutionality. The law was found to be constitutional, and we should note that the court’s decision correctly spelled the word “public” 73 times. Maybe spelling isn’t that difficult.

13. The URL mistakes you’re making every day are earning someone money.

Make a tiny mistake while typing our name, and you might find yourself at healthway.com, a manufacturer of air purifiers.
Those are honest mistakes, but some companies intentionally try to take advantage of typos by setting up “typosquatting” websites. Add a stray vowel while typing a popular site’s URL into your address bar, and you’ll likely end up at one of these sites; the advertisements on the side of the screen will collect a tiny amount of revenue from each accidental view.

[Editorial note: Because many typosquatting websites have malicious intent, we don’t recommend intentionally mistyping the names of well-known websites to try to find typosquatters. Trust us, they’re out there.]
About 57 percent of typosquatting websites feature Google pay-per-click ads; the others make their money via other means. According to an estimate from Harvard Business School associate professor Ben Edelman, Google makes about $497 million from typosquatting on the top 100,000 domains every year.
“In fact, comparing domain parking sites to ordinary search results, we expect that the parking sites (including typosquatting sites) have a higher click-through rate,” Edelman writes. “… If so, advertisers’ costs for typosquatting placements could easily exceed our estimates by a factor of two or more.”

That means that every time you make a mistake while typing a URL, you’re likely contributing to a multi-billion dollar industry. See—we all make mistaekes.
Wait, we meant mistakes. We’re fired, aren’t we?

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Stories Of When Small Symptoms Pointed To Life-Changing Diagnoses

Post author By HealthyWay Staff Writer
Post date November 11, 2019

According to a survey by Bankrate, one in four Americans avoid going to the doctor due to the high cost of medical care. Sometimes, though, money isn’t the issue; we simply don’t believe that we’re that sick. Why spend a few hundred bucks at the doctor’s office when you’ve only got a slight sniffle?
Unfortunately, we don’t have the necessary training to diagnose our own illnesses, and while some symptoms might seem relatively minor, they can be indicative of fairly serious issues. In a recent Reddit thread, users shared their stories of small problems that had big implications.

We collected the best of these stories, edited them slightly for readability, and share them here as cautionary tales.
If you’re thinking about putting off that next routine checkup, these stories might change your mind.

1. Even when one doctor gives you a clean bill of health, you might need a second opinion.

“When I was deployed to Afghanistan as a medic, a medevac pilot came in because he had a small abnormality on his flight physical electrocardiogram (EKG),” Reddit user Absolute906 wrote. “Apparently, this was something he had been getting waivers for years for.”
In other words, the pilot was familiar with the problem, but as far as he knew, it wasn’t really a problem—or at least, it wasn’t anything that would stop him from working.

“I had just finished an [anatomy and physiology] class and had learned about something called Brugada syndrome, which is basically an arrhythmia that causes sudden cardiac death in the patient. I jokingly mentioned how his EKG reminded me of the abnormality I saw in my textbook, thinking there was no way he actually had it. It had to be [an] artifact from the EKG.”
“The doctor’s eyes widened and he sprinted out of the office,” they continued. “The pilot had it. He was immediately relieved of flight duty, sent home, and had a defibrillator put into his heart before being medically retired.”

“I accidentally diagnosed a man with certain death.”
That’s the pessimistic perspective; looking at it another way, Absolute906 had almost certainly saved the pilot from certain death. Brugada syndrome typically causes sudden death around age 40, and because it’s so rare—it’s thought to affect 5 out of every 10,000 people—it’s often missed or ignored until it’s too late.

2. Bad headaches can indicate a serious issue.

We’ve covered this before: headaches can be a serious symptom when they’re frequent or excessively painful. When you can describe a headache as “the worst I’ve ever had,” it’s certainly time to head to your family physician’s office.
“When I was 12, I had a crazy bad headache that wouldn’t go away,” wrote user muffinlova. “My dad brought me to the doctor, and I didn’t even make it to the exam room before they turned me back and sent us to the hospital.”

“It turns out my headache was from a burst sinus cavity…as in, all the bones around my eye broke, and the liquid leaked back onto my brain, giving me brain meningitis. My eye was bulging out to the point where I looked like an alien, and they told my parents I was not going to make it.”
“Obviously, I pulled through, but I was hospitalized for two weeks and missed two months of school. I was, at the time, only the third known case of this happening, and they had flown in doctors from all over the US and from the UK. Crazy stuff.”

3. Even if you feel perfectly healthy, trust your physician.

Reddit user ThePicklest’s father used to be a power lifter. The key word there is “used to.” One day, he felt some unusual pain, so he went to the doctor’s office.
“A nurse comes in to the room, looks down at her chart, looks back up and says, ‘Mr. Pickle, you are having a heart attack.’ He got up on the bed and flexed, saying, ‘Does this look like a man that’s having a heart attack to you?'”
“She looked back down at her chart, up again, and says ‘Yes.’”

Cardiac arrest can have a variety of symptoms, including fatigue, sweating, nausea, and cold or clammy skin (we’ve got a more detailed list of symptoms here). Mr. Pickle—and yes, we love saying that—made a classic mistake by assuming that heart attacks can only affect people who appear obviously unhealthy. Heart attacks don’t always look like they do in the movies; more often than not, they’re surprisingly subtle.
Fortunately, he lived through the episode, although he’s since passed away due to unrelated issues. ThePicklest notes that his father quit powerlifting a short time later and became “way more laid back.”
“He started running more than lifting, and learned to appreciate food a lot more. This was his favorite story to tell.”

4. Any sudden numbness deserves medical attention.

“My mother woke up one day and her arm was numb,” user Stylophonics wrote. “After about 45 minutes, it will still pretty numb. She thought she had pinched a nerve in it sleeping, but went to the ER just in case.”
“She had had a stroke, which actually was caused by a blood clot, which moved up from her heart and exited a hole in her heart—a congenital defect she was unaware she had.”

“She ended up fine and the feeling in her arm came back,” Stylophonics continued, “but she was incredibly lucky that it did.”
Strokes are the leading preventable cause of disability, and by one estimate, 33 percent of Americans have had “mini-strokes” without realizing it. Each year, about 800,000 Americans have strokes. We’re really not trying to scare you—we’re just hoping that some cold, hard numbers help to show the reality.
The good news: Early diagnosis and treatment can greatly reduce the risk of long-term effects. The bad news: You’ve got to actually head to the doctor in order to receive said treatment.

5. Occasionally, physicians miss key symptoms for years…or decades.

“I was in a fender bender car accident—I was at fault—and my lower back would not stop aching,” wrote one Reddit user. “I went into the ER, figuring I had sprained the muscles in my back and that I would be prescribed muscle relaxers and maybe some pain pills.”
Of course, that wasn’t the case. The doctors seemed keenly interested in the patient’s bizarre results.

“Six hours, several x-rays, a CT scan, and four doctors later, I found out my spine was broken and—get this—healed. The best theory any of them could come up with was that my spine had broken during birth, and since we never knew, it just healed itself, filling in with cartilage.”
“One of the doctors told me that, had we known my spine broke at birth, I would have likely never walked. I would have been treated as handicapped my whole life. I didn’t find out until I was 20, and I already had a child. My mom cried because she always thought I was just a really colicky baby, when in fact I was probably in a lot of pain.”

6. When your doctor’s exam procedures seem extreme, go along with them.

“I have male pattern baldness and needed a prescription for some hair growth medication from a dermatologist,” wrote Redditor mattigus. “The doctor said he would give me a prescription, but first wanted to do a full skin check-up, which he does for every new patient. I got annoyed by the fact that I had to strip … in front of this guy just for my hair medicine.”

Hey, there’s a reason that the most effective medicines require a prescription—the physician has to check to make sure that you don’t have any other underlying health conditions that will affect the medication. In this case, that underlying condition was extremely serious.
“A few weeks later, I get a call,” he explained. “There was melanoma cancer on my back. They caught it early enough that it hadn’t spread. That checkup saved my life.”

7. Remember, serious symptoms aren’t always painful.

Reddit user so_illogical said that he might have bit the big one (pun intended) if he hadn’t checked up on some weird symptoms after a routine dental procedure.
“I was taking antibiotics for dental work and noticed these weird blisters showing up everywhere,” they wrote. “Weird, but whatever. 48 hours later, they started opening up, leaving holes in my skin—no blood, I just lost most of the skin in that area. Again, weird, but I was working, so whatever.”

“Then they started appearing in my throat so I got to the hospital ASAP and was diagnosed immediately with Steven-Johnson syndrome. Any longer, and the layers of my skin would have literally peeled away from each other and I would have died. That was a sobering day.”
And people wonder why we hate the dentist.

8. When your physician recommends a CT scan, go for it.

“I had gallstones for three years or so before I finally got my gallbladder ripped out last year,” Redditor dude_icus wrote, using some unnecessarily violent verbiage. “At its worst, I was getting an attack maybe once a month or so, so I figured it couldn’t be that bad.”

“I went to the surgeon for my post-op check-up,” he explained. “He told me that my gallbladder was filled with hundreds of stones of varying sizes, and that it was precancerous. Apparently, people don’t typically get gallbladder cancer until they are in their 80s or 90s. It is often very serious because people don’t catch it right away. I’m in my 20s, and like I said, I had been sitting on this problem for three years for I finally toughened up enough to get it checked out.”
The moral of the story: If you notice a new medical problem, don’t wait to head to the doctor—even if you’re fairly confident that you know what’s happening. You’ve got nothing to lose but your health.
Of course, you might also receive good health advice from a non-physician.
“I owe my life to my barber,” wrote AngryCotton. “When I was 17, he noticed a mole on the top of my head and said I should get that looked at. Two things could’ve happened here: One, I could’ve brushed it off. Two, he didn’t have to say anything.”

“Anyway, I went to get it checked out and ended up having it cut out with a scalpel. Turns out that it was cancerous, but at the very early stages. They did a little more cutting and were able to get everything out. [That was] almost 20 years ago, and life is good.”
Barbers aren’t dermatologists, but they do look at a lot of strange moles—hey, it’s part of the job. If someone tells you that a skin growth is unusual, don’t ignore them (but don’t worry too much until you’ve seen your doctor, as the vast majority of unusual-looking moles are non-cancerous).

9. Some of these stories are pretty heartbreaking.

“My girlfriend is in her final rotations for radiology,” wrote Facerless. “A while back, a young girl came in after winning a basketball championship. She had some shooting shin pain, but wasn’t in a [tremendous amount] of pain, still glowing from the win and talking excitedly about a scholarship offer.”

“When her scan came back, about 60 percent of the marrow in her tibia was one big sarcoma (meaning cancer). Surgery and therapy essentially ended her shot at a full ride.”
Still, it saved her life. While losing a scholarship certainly hurts, we’re guessing that she gladly made the trade.

10. Some rare conditions can prompt a “mock pregnancy.”

“A few years ago, I took a positive pregnancy test,” Doctor_Dalek wrote (she’s not an actual doctor, despite her Whovian username).
“I went to the doctor to confirm, just thinking I would be getting some blood work done and maybe an ultrasound. They did the ultrasound, but couldn’t find a baby in my uterus, so they told me it was ectopic—implanted in a Fallopian tube—and I needed to have surgery to remove the baby.”
“I went into surgery and woke up a few hours later. The first thing I remember is seeing my parents and my fiancé crying. Turns out I was never pregnant; I actually had a tumor the size of my fist on my ovary, and my body was reacting to it like a baby. I had an HCG hormone and everything. I’m 4.5 years in remission.”

Unfortunately, that’s not the only deeply disturbing pregnancy story on this list. Reddit user rockabillynurse is a nurse (hence the username) who was working in postpartum care when a patient came into the hospital in labor with her first child.
“She ended up requiring a C-section. In the operating room, they opened her up and found her belly full of cancerous growths. They immediately paged an oncologist at a neighboring hospital—we were just a women’s and children’s hospital—to come immediately while she was still open. It wound up being terminal. She wouldn’t even have known if she hadn’t needed that C-section.”
“Can you imagine going to the hospital to have your first baby and leaving with a diagnosis of terminal cancer? I think about her all the time.”

11. Any unusual long-term symptom deserves medical attention.

“About four months after I had my son, I started to notice the vision in one of my eyes was really off,” wrote user tranquileyesme. “Blurry, spotty, etc. I didn’t really think about it much, because my eye didn’t hurt and wasn’t itchy, and I had a new baby to take care of.”
“Anyway, it lasted for months. Finally, my mom and sister convinced me I had to go to the eye doctor for it to see what was going on. I took my baby with, because I thought, ‘Hey, quick appointment. Maybe 20-30 minutes, and I’ll probably leave with some eye drops or something.'”
“Honestly, one of the worst days of my life. They put me through test after test. I was there for hours. I ended up calling my mom to come get the baby. They weren’t telling me anything. They scheduled an MRI for the next morning, because by this time, my 11 a.m. appointment had dragged out until 5:30 p.m., and the clinic was closed. We were the only people there. Still no answers. I am freaking out.”

“[I] go back the next day and get the MRI done,” she continued. “They send me to the neurologist this time—no eye doctors today. When I walk in, he has all the results from my tests the day before and the MRI I had just taken a while before. I was told I had multiple sclerosis. It was very scary.”
She says she’s doing well, thanks to a supportive family and a firm commitment to her therapy.
“The first years were the hardest, with [having] a toddler and learning to adjust. Now he’s 10 and more self-sufficient. We decided not to have more children, which was really hard, but overall the best decision for our family.”
Tranquileyesme’s doctors responded to her symptoms quickly and effectively, but not everyone is so lucky. If you feel that your physician isn’t taking your symptoms seriously—or if you think that you could benefit from a second opinion—don’t be afraid to say so.
“[I had] increasingly painful periods and nasty PMS symptoms in general,” wrote my_random_thots. “My family doctor attributed the change to age and just wouldn’t take it seriously. After a year of complaints, the doctor prescribed birth control pills, which did nothing.”

“After two years, I finally lost it and cried in her office. The cramps had gone from, ‘Hmm, this is a bit more than usual,’ to full-on WTF, 8/10, white-knuckle-puking-level pain. I asked to please, please be referred to an OBGYN.”
Fortunately, her doctor relented and provided an appropriate reference.
“When the gynecologist examined me, he also did an ultrasound in the office. He took one look at the screen [and] told me I could dress and that he’d be right back. When he returned, he was carrying his surgery bookings schedule. A few weeks later, I had a total hysterectomy and bilateral salpingectomy (tubes out). It would usually take up to a year to book that surgery, but he said he absolutely had to find me a spot.”
“He was horrified I hadn’t been seen much sooner and described my uterus as ‘more tumor than healthy tissue; it looks more like a raspberry than a pear.’ Fortunately, it was just benign fibroid [tumors], but it taught me a lesson: If something hurts, get help! Yell if you have to.”

While healthcare providers rarely act maliciously, many have biases against women. Medical schools are starting to address the problem, but unfortunately, some physicians don’t take women’s pain seriously. Patient advocates recommend being direct and asking about the basis of a physician’s recommendations. Don’t assume that you’re overreacting by asking for another opinion; it’s very possible that your physician is under-reacting.

12. When in doubt, see a specialist.

General practitioners are your first line of defense against serious diseases, but if you’ve got unusual symptoms, ask for a recommendation for a specialist.
“I don’t think you’d classify this as an illness, but I would clean my ears regularly, yet whenever I went to the doctors, they always said there was too much wax and [that they] couldn’t see anything,” wrote werekitty93. “My ears tended to hurt frequently, and I had a hard time hearing for years.”

“In high school, I went to a doctor who, as usual, checked my ears. Instead of just brushing it off and saying I need to clean more, she decided to do a total flush. Took two or three hours total to get both ears cleared, and when we were done, she discovered I had an ear infection that was most likely a year old. As a result, I can’t hear well out of either ear, but that ear in particular has more hearing loss than the other.”
“We also discovered why I had such an abundance of earwax. We figured out I had hyper hydrosis (an overactive sweat gland) that also caused my ears to make more wax. I have been instructed never to use Q-tips again—it just cakes the wax to the sides of my ears—and I go see a doctor once a month to have them flushed. So, had we just had a doctor flush my ears probably five years sooner, I wouldn’t have such hearing loss.”
That’s a tragic story, and unfortunately, it’s not the only example we found of physicians ignoring important information.

“[This wasn’t] me, but my 9-year-old son,” wrote Prima13. “Last summer, he complained about leg tiredness and slept a lot. Our pediatrician couldn’t find anything wrong with him. Fast forward to January 2017, and suddenly he’s constipated and his bladder is retaining enormous amounts of urine. We took him to the local children’s hospital, and they felt that his constipation was keeping him from releasing urine, so they hit him with gallons of Miralax mixture to get him moving.”
The treatment cured his constipation, but he still had his other symptoms.
“After a week of this at the hospital, my wife lost her mind on the hospital staff and demanded that they think outside the box. The neurology department came in and did an MRI, and they found that he had a fatty filum at the base of his spine which presented as a tethered cord.”
“They operated immediately. Unfortunately, now the damage is done. My son no longer has bowel or bladder function because of the nerve damage caused by the tethered cord, so we have to use a straight catheter on him six times a day and keep after his bowels with stimulant laxatives and enemas.”

“We will be entering a clinic in May where they will run a series of daily X-rays and enemas to arrive at the mixture we will need to use going forward. Poor kid will have to live with this the rest of his life. My wife and I are sick over it. If the issue had been caught sooner, he might not have to deal with this. If we had waited longer, it’s possible he could have lost the use of his legs.”
Keep in mind that doctors are only human, and they’re prone to delivering inaccurate diagnoses. One survey of nationwide autopsies found a 40 percent misdiagnosis rate. About 10 to 12 percent of those missed diagnoses were classified as “significant.” Granted, those numbers only look at patients who succumbed to fatal conditions—not patients who ultimately recovered—but the takeaway is that physicians make mistakes, and second opinions are often essential tools in crafting an appropriate treatment plan.

13. Strange symptoms deserve attention, even if you’ve always lived with them.

We hope that we’re not driving this point into the ground, but it’s important: If something seems unusual, get it checked out.
“I was much taller than [the rest of] my family,” wrote CrustyHamSandwich. “My family are all around 5’5″, but I was 6’5″ by high school. We always joked that I was a freak or won the genetic lottery.”

“I went to my father’s doctor for a physical, who noticed the swelling in my hands and ran a blood test. Turns out, my growth hormone levels were about three times the normal amount. I was diagnosed with Acromegaly. Got an MRI which showed I had a tumor on my pituitary gland. I got it removed and was feeling better after a few years.”
Another Reddit user developed an unusual taste for lettuce, which eventually convinced them to seek medical help.
“I started craving iceberg lettuce like you wouldn’t believe,” wrote lovetheblazer. “Like, I’d wake up in the middle of the night and go to the fridge just to eat handfuls of lettuce. At my worst, I was eating an entire bag of iceberg lettuce a day, no dressing or toppings, just munching on it like it was popcorn at the movie theater.”

“I finally decided I should drag myself to the doctor for a few blood tests, assuming I was a bit dehydrated or vitamin deficient or something. My hemoglobin level was 5 when it should be 13-16, ideally. My ferritin (iron stores) level was 1, which is literally as low as the test goes. I went straight from the doctor’s office to the hospital to be admitted for two blood transfusions and an intravenous iron infusion.”
“The hospital staff couldn’t believe I’d been walking around and even working overtime with a level that low for months. Within 24 hours of my blood and iron transfusions, my lettuce craving went away.”
Iron deficiencies are an especially significant problem for women, as we’ve covered in other pieces. You should know the symptoms—but remember, you can still have a condition without having the classic symptoms.
“[My wife] had a rare liver disease that sprung out of nowhere when she was 23,” wrote CountShaftula.
She missed the symptoms because she didn’t have visible jaundice—the yellowing the eyes and skin most commonly associated with liver disease. Instead, she felt extremely itchy.

“She figured it was just really dry skin,” the Reddit user continued. “Turned out to be PSC (Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis). But she’s two years post-transplant and doing great!”

So, how do you know whether you really need to see your physician?

When in doubt, go ahead and set up an appointment. No one’s going to accuse you of being a hypochondriac just because you checked out some unusual symptoms, and as these stories demonstrate, you’re better safe than sorry.
“As a physician: listen to your bodies,” user Doctorpayne wrote. “You guys know yourselves much better than we will even after talking to you in an emergency room for 5-10 minutes. If something is going on that is far outside the usual, please come in to the ER. I would much rather see you and tell you you’re fine [rather than] than sick beyond the point of repair.”
With that said, don’t overreact if you’ve experienced any of the symptoms in this article. These stories are notable because they’re the exception; chances are good that you’ll be perfectly fine. Still, it never hurts to stay on top of your health.

Tags lengthened

Trending

Stories Of When Small Symptoms Pointed To Life-Changing Diagnoses

Post author By Jamie Wiles
Post date September 18, 2019

1. Even when one doctor gives you a clean bill of health, you might need a second opinion.

“I had just finished an [anatomy and physiology] class and had learned about something called Brugada syndrome, which is basically an arrhythmia that causes sudden cardiac death in the patient. I jokingly mentioned how his EKG reminded me of the abnormality I saw in my textbook, thinking there was no way he actually had it. It had to be [an] artifact from the EKG.”

“The doctor’s eyes widened and he sprinted out of the office,” they continued. “The pilot had it. He was immediately relieved of flight duty, sent home, and had a defibrillator put into his heart before being medically retired.”

2. Bad headaches can certainly indicate a serious issue.

3. Even if you feel perfectly healthy, trust your physician.

Reddit user ThePicklest’s father used to be a powerlifter. The key word there is “used to.” One day, he felt some unusual pain, so he went to the doctor’s office.
“A nurse comes in to the room, looks down at her chart, looks back up and says, ‘Mr. Pickle, you are having a heart attack.’ He got up on the bed and flexed, saying, ‘Does this look like a man that’s having a heart attack to you?'”
“She looked back down at her chart, up again, and says ‘Yes.’”

4. Any sudden numbness certainly deserves medical attention.

5. Occasionally, physicians miss key symptoms for years…or decades.

6. When your doctor’s exam procedures seem extreme, go along with them.

7. Remember, serious symptoms aren’t always painful.

8. When your physician recommends a CT scan, go for it.

9. Some of these stories are pretty heartbreaking.

10. Some rare conditions can prompt a “mock pregnancy.”

11. Any unusual long-term symptom certainly deserves medical attention.

So, how do you know whether you really need to see your physician?

Tags 9/18/19, Publishupdate, social

Trending

Delivery Room Workers Explain What Happens When A Baby Clearly Isn't The Father's

Post author By HealthyWay Staff Writer
Post date September 13, 2019

By some estimates, as many as 9 percent of children have misattributed paternity. That means that their biological father isn’t the man who raised them—and the children are never made aware of that (quite crucial) information.

Of course, paternity statistics are difficult to accurately assess, since you can’t easily perform a genuinely random sample. If a mother knows that her baby’s daddy isn’t, ahem, the baby’s daddy, she might reasonably refuse to take part in a survey, skewing the results.

Still, we know that it happens—and sometimes, the would-be father discovers the deception in the delivery room. Over several different threads, Reddit users shared their stories of parentage gone awry. For the most part, the stories come from doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals who saw families react when they realized that their new baby obviously wasn’t the father’s biological child.

Needless to say, some of these stories are fairly…uncomfortable. We sorted out a few of the best, then edited them for grammar and readability. Strap in, because these get pretty rough.

1. Sometimes, you’ve got to make the best out of a bad situation.

Hey, infidelity happens; when you realize that you’ve only got a 50 percent chance of being a father, you might as well see it through before making any irrational decisions.

Reddit user Racheltower’s father is an obstetrician. She tells how a woman recently visited his office with her husband…and her boyfriend.

“They don’t know who the father is, and they can’t find out until the baby is born,” she explained, “so both men want to be there during doctor appointments and the birth.”

That seems like an incredibly awkward situation, but to their credit, both of the potential fathers stepped up to the plate.

“The two men were surprisingly cordial with each other,” she said, “but I’m betting they’ll run a paternity test before the umbilical cord is even cut.”

For what it’s worth, obstetricians can actually determine paternity prior to birth, but the current method involves a sampling procedure that could potentially endanger the fetus.

2. In this story, the parentage isn’t really up for debate.

User Idkjill is a nurse, and she shared one of the more baffling experiences she’s encountered on the job.

“Once, we had a couple come in—just them,” she wrote. “The father was black, and the mother was white. The father was so involved and so ecstatic about becoming a father for the second time with this women.”

“Nothing really seemed off until she started pushing. The baby girl came out completely white, with blonde hair and blue eyes. Usually, black babies come out a little pale, but this was just straight-out white.”

“We had to escort the father out for fear of him becoming violent, but he just sat outside the room, on the ground with his face in his hands. That was one of the saddest moments I think I’ve ever seen.”

The bad news: It gets much, much worse.

“Odd thing afterwards, though, the mom didn’t want the baby and wanted nothing to do with the ‘father,’ probably out of guilt,” she wrote, “so she left the responsibility of this baby and their other 2-year-old boy to this man—who didn’t even question taking on this child.”

While that’s heartbreaking, it’s good to know that those kids have at least one great parent. We hope he was able to move on quickly without her.

3. This story doesn’t reflect well on anyone involved.

Sometimes, these stories are so off-the-wall that we doubt they’re real—but for some reason, that doesn’t make them any less entertaining.

“My cousin was an obstetrics nurse in a central European country,” wrote Reddit user Thunder_bird.

Two pregnant women entered the nurse’s maternity ward, but unfortunately, one of the mothers lost her child during delivery. Naturally, she was grief-stricken; she told the nurse that she’d been trying for a baby for many years.

“She and her husband were overjoyed to carry a baby to term,” Thunder_bird wrote. “The husband was not present in the ward that day, but the lady said he would be devastated.”

The other lady delivered a healthy baby, but she was also upset; she already had four children and was unable to financially support a fifth.

“She did not want to look after yet another baby,” they wrote. “Her husband was very upset she was pregnant again—not that he was blameless, but that’s a different story. He was at work and was not at the hospital that day.”

“My cousin talked to the other nurses. No paperwork had been completed, so the staff put both women in the same room with the one healthy baby and suggested they may want to talk.”

“Forty minutes later, the lady without a child was holding the healthy baby. Both women looked happy and relieved. Few words were spoken, but the paperwork was written up by the staff to reverse the records of the two births … They were of the same ethnic background and had similar features, so the swap probably went undetected.”

Obviously, that story has huge ethical issues, and we doubt it’d be possible in American hospitals. Still, it sort of has a happy ending…right?

4. Sometimes, the baby’s appearance isn’t what indicates their parentage.

Reddit user Fuzzus628’s mother worked at a medical laboratory “many decades ago.”

“One day, another woman who worked in the building was visiting the lab,” he wrote. “During the conversation, she mentioned that she was blood type X, her husband was type Y, and their child was type Z. I don’t remember the specific types.”

Well, it’s good that those aren’t the actual blood types, since we’re pretty sure that type Z makes you a zombie.

“One of the younger lab techs blurted out, ‘That’s impossible,’ and the doctor in the lab just stared daggers at him. Luckily, the visitor either didn’t notice or didn’t care, and moved along shortly after. My mom still remembers it as one of the most awkward moments she’d ever been privy to.”

That person probably should have realized the issue while doing Punnett squares in high school biology class.

5. Then again, sometimes appearance is a dead giveaway.

“My brother was doing his OBGYN rotation,” wrote user inkseep1. “In the first birth he assisted, the woman had her husband leave the room. That seems odd these days, but nevertheless, my brother had the husband step out for the comfort of the patient.

If you’re paying attention at all, you know where this was going. The color of the baby’s skin “wasn’t even close” to the skin tone of the father.

“There were lily-white parents and a very black baby,” inkseep1 wrote. “She wanted my brother to stay to talk to her husband, who is about to come back, and he bails on the whole situation. She was playing the odds all the way to the end.”

User CompanionQuandary has a similar story, but she actually stayed in the room to walk the parents through the uncomfortable moment.

“I am a nurse working in labor and delivery,” she wrote. “Most of the time, if the mom thinks the baby may not belong to her boyfriend or husband, she will just have their friend/sister/mom with them there for the delivery, then have the dad come to the hospital room after seeing the baby.”

“There are no guarantees because babies can change a lot over a couple weeks. Many African American babies have very light skin when they are born, which gets darker over time.”

“I have had a patient’s husband get upset about the baby being too light—they were both black—until his mom smacked him and told him that’s what he looked like when he was born.”

“Recently, I had something interesting happen. A girl comes in, in labor, with her boyfriend, sister, and a friend. The boyfriend doesn’t seem too engaged during the process, but that’s not uncommon. The baby is born and is fine, and the sister sends Dad to get some stuff.”

It’s important to note that all of the people involved only speak Spanish, and while CompanionQuandary speaks some medical Spanish to assist with procedures like deliveries, she’s certainly not fluent.

“As soon as the dad leaves, the sister is like, ‘I have a question for you,’ and then proceeds to say something I can’t understand at all. I try to clarify, but I’m just not getting it, so I offer to go get the translator.”

“She’s like, ‘No, I don’t want it to be official.’ She whips out her phone, and through Google translate asks, ‘How can we get a paternity test in the hospital?’”

“I then have to explain that we really don’t do that, but she can get one at CVS. They tell me that the baby doesn’t look like the mom’s other child with this guy, and it might be someone else’s, but they want to check before telling him. So I just apologize and tell them how they can get a DNA test at CVS, and that they cost about $50.”

“This isn’t the first time I’ve been asked about paternity testing, but I just had no idea how you say it in Spanish.”

Some commenters felt that this mother was being unethical here, but CompanionQuandary warns against rushing to judgment.

“You don’t know anyone else’s life circumstances, so it is best to reserve judgment about the choices they have made or you think they may have made,” she explains. “Not every situation is cut-and-dry. Plenty of biological fathers leave and do not support their children, and women are not all lying villains. Life is very gray—just treat people with respect and compassion.”

That’s good advice to keep in mind during these next few stories.

6. This one will make your blood boil.

“I’m a nurse in a level 4 neonatal ICU,” wrote user RavenousButterfly. “We service the sickest of the sick from our state and the surrounding states, so we see it all.”

A baby came into the ICU with life-threatening sepsis caused by herpes. In most cases, RavenousButterfly wrote, doctors try to treat herpes while the mother is pregnant, which greatly reduces the risk of serious complications.

“In this case, the mom didn’t even know she was a carrier,” they wrote. “So where did it come from? This is the awkward and sickening moment when everyone in the room realized where the herpes came from. Turns out, the father had an affair and contracted the virus from his lover.”

“So, yeah, while this woman’s baby is on the verge of death, she finds out her husband has been cheating on her and his cheating a** is the reason their baby is sick.”

That’s not quite a case of misplaced parentage, but it’s infuriating enough to make the list.

7. Sometimes, biology isn’t the most important part of the story.

“My fiance’s father is almost certainly not his biological dad,” wrote user Bagzilla. “His mom was just a genuinely terrible human being who didn’t even try to hide the fact she was cheating.”

“But his dad loved him from the second he was born, and when the mom decided four years later that she just didn’t want the kid anymore, she just gave him to his dad and rode off.”

We don’t know their situation, but it sounds like the kid was better off without his mother in the picture.

“His dad ended up getting married, and he tried for kids before finding out his sperm count was too low to ever father children,” Bagzilla continues. “They ended up adopting many years later.”

“He sat my fiance down when my fiance was 13 and told him the truth, and said that if my friend wanted to test, they would, but it was up to him. My friend cried, and told his father that he just wanted him to be his dad, and that was the end of that.”

Ultimately, the blood test wouldn’t have proved anything; regardless of biological parentage, the kid certainly grew up with his “real” father.

8. Blood typing is complicated…except when it isn’t.

“I’m a NICU nurse that was floating to the nursery,” user Mimimullen wrote. “A baby was born with a genetic abnormality, but was otherwise doing fine. The pediatrician was in the parents’ room discussing the follow-up type stuff for the baby—appointments with a geneticist, an orthopedic surgeon, etc.”

“At some point in the conversation, the mother asked what the baby’s blood type was, to which the pediatrician responded ‘A+.’ The father of the baby insisted that was impossible, as he and his wife were both O-. This was their third baby.”

“The pediatrician got totally flustered and came back to the nursery to verify the lab results. The baby really was A+. We even went so far as to redraw the baby’s blood and retest it. Nope, A+.”

“There is absolutely no chance that the baby belonged to that man. The husband left the hospital soon afterwards and didn’t show up again until it was time to pick up the mom and baby to bring them home. The mom spent the rest of the hospital stay lying alone, in the dark, mostly hiding under the covers.”

We should note that genetic mutations can actually cause these types of issues; two O- parents could potentially have a child with a different blood type. Those types of genetic mutations are extremely rare, but hopefully, this was one of those cases.

9. If you’re feeling disappointed in the human race, this story should provide some relief.

“My aunt is a nurse in the maternity ward,” wrote Beachy5313. “She had a couple come in; they were both very black. The lady has the baby, and it is [extremely] white, like, totally pale, with no trace of any pigment.”

You probably think that you know where this one is going, but think again.

“They put the baby on her mom and the mom starts yelling about how this isn’t her baby, and how they stole her baby,” Beachy5313 continued. “In all fairness, you can be very confused during and after delivery, so it wasn’t stupidity. [She was] just sobbing and freaking out, and the father is just sitting there and looks very confused because he’s realizing that even if she did cheat, there is no way the baby would be that white. The doctor and nurses are trying to assure her that this is her baby, and that the skin usually darkens later.”

“Come to find out, when the father called his mom, she pointed out that they have a second cousin who is albino, and maybe baby got that gene. Turns out, that’s what happened; the baby was albino.”

That’s pretty much the best-case scenario for that unusual situation. Albinism, by the way, affects people of all races, and while it’s rare, one out of every 17,000 people has some form of albinism. While it’s a lifelong condition with several health implications, it usually doesn’t affect lifespan.

It can, however, make for awkward conversations in the delivery room.

10. Several of the stories came from children with complicated histories.

“Oh boy, I’m the illegitimate baby in this one!” wrote RikaBaF27. “Apparently, my mom and ‘dad’ were on a break, so she had a one-night-stand with a dude she just met at a party. Later, she tells my ‘dad’ that she’s pregnant with his kid, so they get back together so he can support her.”
“I was born pretty dark because my biological dad was very, very Native American. The nurses made comments about me being a dark baby, but I guess ‘dad’ attributed it to the bit of Native in my mom, even though she’s very pale skinned.”
“Anyway, this being Oklahoma, of course my ‘dad’ marries her to do the right thing. I was adopted by him after the wedding at about 10 months old. A month later, my brother was born—definitely my dad’s kid—and not long after that, they had a fight, and she drops the revelation on him that I wasn’t his.”

“No idea why it wasn’t more obvious, or [maybe] was he in denial. Both my ‘brothers’ are redheaded, light eyed, and pale skinned with freckles. I popped out the womb with dark hair, dark skin, dark eyes, and no freckles. Even the nurses were like, ‘What a cute Indian (Native American) baby!’”
“But during the divorce (after he had known the truth for a few years), he fought for me along with my brothers and eventually got custody of all of us. He planned on never telling me, but eventually my mom’s loud-mouthed, complete piece of [trash] sister decided to let me know during an argument.
“That was probably the first time I really saw my dad cry. He’s had periods of not being the best dad, but overall, I ended up getting all my most defining traits from him: his commitment to [making decisions], his maniac work ethic—which was how he showed love—and his strength to keep moving forward despite constantly getting [screwed] by any woman he trusts. I think he’s done looking for love. It makes me sad because he really deserves it. Maybe if my mom had been a better person, he would have had a chance at that.”

11. Unfortunately, some situations aren’t as easy to resolve.

“I know a girl who was pregnant with her boyfriend’s best friend’s baby,” wrote one Reddit user. “He found out there was a possibility about a week before she gave birth. I went up to see her once he was born, and [the baby] looked just like the friend. There was no question. I broke the news to her boyfriend, and he was absolutely devastated.”
“His parents were heartbroken and super pissed. They had bought the girl everything she needed, including a $500 car seat/stroller set. She refused to give anything back. She started up a relationship with the friend immediately after having their child, and they’re still together a decade later. But the kicker for me has always been that the boyfriend and best friend were next-door neighbors.”

“She moved into his house after coming home from the hospital. So her ex-boyfriend and his family had to see them basically every day, raising this child that they had believed to be his for the entire pregnancy. I can’t even imagine.”
In a later comment, the Reddit user clarified that the parents did a DNA test shortly after the baby was born, so there wasn’t any question as to whether the “best friend” was the father.

**12. In some cases, the baby realizes what’s wrong before the doctors.**

So, we cheated. This one doesn’t happen in the delivery room—nor the same decade as the birth.
“I’m a [surgical] nurse,” wrote andybent25. “I had an older male patient who was in for anemia with critically low hemoglobin levels, receiving a few units of blood.”
“I’d been taking care of him the last couple of days, and his daughter was visiting at the time with the patient’s wife and him. We had to do our two-nurse identification process for the blood, where we go over the name, ID numbers, and blood type for confirmation before hanging it on the patient.”
If you’re paying attention to the other stories in this article, you know where this is headed.
“When we were going through it, the daughter stops us and asks us what blood type we’d just said. I didn’t really understand why at the time, but I told her again, and she got really concerned we may be hanging the wrong blood.”

“She said that couldn’t be right, because she was an anatomy professor, and there was no way the crossmatch could be right. She was AB, and she knew her mom had blood type A, so her dad couldn’t possibly be A.”
“I didn’t think much of it and went back to the doctor to ask him for another crossmatch. He was like, ‘Oh, yeah, she might not be his daughter, then.’ We ordered another crossmatch, and sure enough, it came back as an A blood type.”
“She just sat in the corner really quiet [for] the rest of the day with a really sad look on her face. Her mom and dad didn’t really get what was going on, but I know [the mother] had some idea.”

13. When the story involves teenagers, you know it’s going to be rough.

“My (ex) girlfriend delivered a baby while I was in the delivery room, and turns out it wasn’t mine,” wrote Nope_Thats_Not_Me.
“She was 16, I was 15. All along, I was under the impression that this kid was mine, and [it was] time to be an adult. I took all the classes, read the books, worked every night [and] weekend to save whatever money I could as a 15-year-old.”
“I finally get the call she is in labor, so I have somebody rush me to the ER. Luckily for her, it wasn’t a long labor—only about six hours—but there was a complication: The baby came out with the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck. The doctor assured us it was going to be okay, but the nurses were prepping for things to go south.”
“The baby comes out, it’s a light shade of purple, and the nurses immediately take the baby and put on the smallest mask you have ever seen (to help it get oxygen, I guess). I was too panicked to ask a lot of questions. They [say] they need to keep the baby on watch overnight, so I stay in the room with the ex.”
“The next evening, baby is back in the room with us, and all seems well. The ex is asleep, and the same nurse from the night before comes into the room and beckons me out.”

“She states that, at risk of her losing her job, she has to break some harsh news to me; that kid is not mine.”
“She said that while it wasn’t obvious at this stage, over the next few weeks, it would become clear this kid was mixed [race]. Since both of us were white, it was a high probability that it wasn’t mine.”
“Queue a mixed bag of emotions. [I promptly woke] the ex to get a little clarification. Come to find out, she knew the chances, and was just hoping it was mine because it worked better for her.”
“Apparently, her father was old-school racist, and she didn’t want to have to deal with that. I left the hospital to collect my thoughts, and a few weeks later, I was served with child support papers. One DNA test and about six weeks later, I am 0.0 percent that kid’s father.”
“Wherever that nurse is now, I hope your life is amazing. I understand that you were not supposed to get involved in the personal side of things and keep it professional, but you saved me a lot of additional headache.”

14. Sometimes, these stories actually turn out alright.

“A friend of mine has a good one,” wrote notmebutmyroommate—we’re guessing this is about her roommate, but we can’t be sure.
“[The] dad passed out during the delivery, and when he came to, the nurse handed him a baby girl that was several shades darker than him or his wife. The baby was also apparently conceived under such circumstances that he knew he was the father.”
“So this guy was walking around delivery trying to figure out who’s baby he had. He was popping his head into random rooms, asking if anyone had misplaced a baby. This continues until he ran into his great grandma, who proclaimed that baby girl is the spitting image of her late husband.”
“No one has ever told him that his [great] grandpa was black.”

While a baby’s complexion often matches that of one or both of their parents, this isn’t always the case. As The Daily Mail notes, “it is possible, though fairly infrequent, that dark-skinned parents give birth to a pale-skinned child, or vice versa, if their own parents or grandparents [have a different skin color].”
In other words—and we probably don’t have to say this—don’t assume that skin color is a telltale sign of an infant’s parentage.

Tags 9/13/18, Publishupdate, social

Trending

Cole And Lili: Are They or Aren’t They?

Post author By HealthyWay Staff Writer
Post date July 24, 2019

Jughead and Betty may be #couplegoals on the hit drama Riverdale, but actors Cole Sprouse and Lili Reinhart are (or were) extremely private about their real-life romance. The couple reportedly got together in 2017, and fans fawned at their every move—but after Comic-Con 2019, rumors of their breakup started swirling.
We’re taking a look back at their relationship—and trying to decode where their relationship stands today.

March 18, 2017

Fans were already shipping Cole and Lili from the moment Riverdale premiered in January 2017, but the real-life dating rumors started when Cole posted this photo of Lili in a field of flowers.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BRyiMLGAYQx/?utm_source=ig_embed

April 22, 2017

The next month, Cole posted another photo of Lili frolicking through a field of flowers, but this time the caption was much more telling. Fans quickly decided that it must be Cole’s admission of love.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BTNSkJJFwYb/?utm_source=ig_embed

June 12, 2017

Lili responded to a quirky photo of himself Cole shared on Twitter. Her response included the heart eyes emoji, the fire emoji, and…ahem…just take a look for yourself:
https://twitter.com/lilireinhart/status/874455438024204289

July 22, 2017

During an interview at Comic-Con 2017, fans spotted Cole and Lili sneakily caressing one another’s hands in an interview.

via GIPHY
Lili was photographed wearing Cole’s jacket later that night.

Cole really did give his jacket to Lili I'm- pic.twitter.com/jsVGbq1bFG

— Bread Inside (@emilysprentits) July 23, 2017

August 4, 2017

Lili wrote a sweet birthday message to Cole in an Instagram post.
“To the man who has showed me more beautiful places in the past year than I have ever seen in my whole life. Happy birthday, Cole. Thank you for all the adventures and here’s to many more.”

View this post on Instagram

To the man who has showed me more beautiful places in this past year than I have ever seen in my whole life. Happy birthday, Cole. Thank you for all of the adventures and here’s to many more 🌙

A post shared by Lili Reinhart (@lilireinhart) on Aug 4, 2017 at 11:09am PDT

No big deal, right? Right?!

September 13, 2017

Cole and Lili held hands on the cover of Entertainment Weekly.

…But in the accompanying interview, Cole seemed to suggest that his relationship with Lili was all in fans’ heads.

Since the show began, people have wanted Lili and I to be together. People have wanted Lili and Camila to be together. People have wanted KJ and I to be together. People have wanted every actor on this show to be in a union that they could make real. Truthfully, it’s very pleasing that people talk about Lili and I in that way because it means that we’re resonating so strongly that people really want that to be true.

October 17, 2017

Cole shared another stunning photo of Lili to his Instagram. He captioned it “410,” which was mysterious to fans. Could it be referring to a date? Or an inside joke between the two? Either way, we were swooning.

View this post on Instagram

410

A post shared by Cole Sprouse (@colesprouse) on Oct 17, 2017 at 4:08pm PDT

October 25, 2017

On Live With Kelly and Ryan, Cole admitted that he doesn’t mind making out with Lili. “They’re contractually obliged to give me as many kiss scenes as possible this season,” he joked. “I wrote it into my contract.”

January 1, 2018

The pair spent New Years together in Hawaii!

Cole Sprouse and Lili Reinhart with a fan today in Hawaii! pic.twitter.com/G9Dbk71zSO

— Riverdale News (DAILY) (@_riverdalenews) January 2, 2018

January 10, 2018

Lili refused to open up about her and Cole’s relationship to V Magazine.
“People are just dying to know information about if I’m in a relationship or not. I understand the interest, but it’s called a private life for a reason. And it’s not something that I owe the world.”

March 25, 2018

While promoting their upcoming season, the cast of Riverdale attended Paley Fest 2018. When it came time for audience questions one fan (and Bughead hero) decided to ask the question everyone was dying to know:
“Cole and Lili, there’s been a lot of rumors of you guys dating. …Are you dating?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpxwX6KvWbQ&feature=youtu.be
“No comment,” Cole whispered awkwardly into his mic.

April 2, 2018

Cole and Lili got caught kissing in public! During a press trip to Paris, France, paparazzi caught this photo:

April 4, 2018

Two days after the Paris kiss, they basically confirmed their relationship. TMZ caught the pair at LAX airport and asked them if it was a big decision to go public with their relationship.
Lili’s response? “It’s obvious.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRgz6c6yuyk

April 17, 2018

The couple may have had a romantic getaway in Mexico. Although they never posted a photo together, some eagle-eyed fans spotted what looks to be Lili’s shadow in one of Cole’s vacation photos.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Cole Sprouse (@colesprouse) on Apr 17, 2018 at 10:36am PDT

May 7, 2018

Finally! Lili and Cole made their red carpet debut at the 2018 Met Gala.

July 2, 2018

During an interview with Harper’s BAZAAR, Lili talked about her struggles with talking about her relationship publicly.

“I’m not okay talking about my relationship, I’m not going to tell you my love story. That’s just not appropriate right now.”

July 27, 2018

After filming the third season of Riverdale, the two got together to watch the blood moon lunar eclipse. Lili documented her night with Cole on her Instagram story.

August 4, 2018

On Cole’s twenty-sixth birthday, Lili posted an Instagram photo of Sprouse captioned:
“It seems as if the world would still be a stranger to me, if not for you. I’m so thankful that our paths intertwined to form this beautiful adventure~Happy birthday, my love.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/BmEFDjtAWUs/?utm_source=ig_embed

August 12, 2018

Cole and Lili attended the 2018 Teen Choice Awards along with their Riverdale castmates. Although they did not win, Cole and Lili were nominated for Choice TV: Ship and Choice TV: Liplock.

However, they very noticeably did not walk the red carpet together or pose for pictures together. A fan also captured a photo of the show’s seating arrangement which showed Cole and Lili sitting near each other, but with an empty seat between them.

August 30, 2018

While filming Riverdale season 3, Lili posted a photo of her and Cole posing in France.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BnHVMoMA7c1/

September 10, 2018

Cole posted a photo of the pair almost kissing. Simply captioned “It’s pretty, pretty late”
https://www.instagram.com/p/BniXTt3ntBD/?utm_source=ig_embed

September 13, 2018

For Lili’s twenty-second birthday, Cole posted a gorgeous photo of Lili. Along with the picture, Cole wrote, “Both the birthday and the gift. My little muse, happy birthday my love.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/BnriRFaH346/?utm_source=ig_embed

October 1, 2018

In an interview with Who What Wear, Lili opened up about why keeping her relationship private is so important to her.

I think it’s just that I’m so protective over it. It’s not something the world needs to know about, because if you give them anything, they are just going to want more. I’m not going to hide away from my relationship or hide away from what’s going on in my life, but what does happen in my relationship is so private, and I cherish it a lot. He does as well. A relationship is a very intimate thing, and I want it to be between me and him, not me, him, and the world.

October 13, 2018

Lili shared a sweet photo of Cole on a beach with the caption “I hope you don’t mind.” Cole hilariously commented back, “Are you guys dating”
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bo5jNw4h6e_/?utm_source=ig_embed

November 10, 2018

After Idris Elba won People’s Sexiest Man Alive, Lili weighed in with her own thoughts in an Instagram story. She posted a photo of Cole with the caption “my 2018 sexiest man alive.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/BqAIV24l09B/?utm_source=ig_embed

November 22, 2018

Big step! Cole traveled to North Carolina to spend Thanksgiving with Lili’s family.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BqfrVy0AvBf/

January 6, 2019

Rumors first started circulating about the couple breaking up when they didn’t go to the Golden Globes together, and it had been a noticeably long time since the couple had been seen together.
At the time, though, Cole was out of the country with Riverdale costar KJ Apa.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BsDEBcql1QD/?utm_source=ig_embed

February 11, 2019

However, just in time for Valentine’s Day, Cole and Lili set the record straight about their relationship. Amid break up rumors, Cole posted a photo of Lili laying in the snow.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BtxM_UZHPce/?utm_source=ig_embed

March 7, 2019

Lili supported cole at his movie premiere for Five Feet Apart. The couple posed together on the red carpet, holding each other close.

April 29, 2019

Lili shared a video of Cole getting licked in the face by a cute pup. Someone in the background says “She thinks that you’re Dylan,” referring to Cole’s twin brother. “She does the same thing to Dylan.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bw0-Ew1gJOx/?utm_source=ig_embed

July 22, 2019

Rumors began swirling that Sprousehart was over. This time, it seemed real. Multiple sources reported that the couple called it quits after 2 years together, though the pair held off on addressing the public.
According to Us Weekly, “The Riverdale co-stars were spotted keeping their distance from each other at the Entertainment Weekly Comic-Con party in San Diego on Saturday, July 21. They both mingled with Riverdale castmates at different times, but were rarely seen together.”
Cole told a friend that they broke up, the site reported, and he ended up going home with costars Apa and Camila Mendes.
Sources close to the couple also said that the two won’t be living together while filming the next season of Riverdale, reported E! News.

Despite their alleged split, the costars seemed cordial when they sat next to each other during the show’s panel on July 21. Lili even later joked about her ex and Apa goofing off. “Please don’t put me between these two ever again” she joked in an Instagram caption of the trio.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B0NKSuvg7oc/
Fans, needless to say, were having a hard time coping with the thought of the real-life couple splitting.

Lili and Cole broke up and now I don’t know if I believe in love anymore.

— Katelyn Christine (@klovee013) July 22, 2019

But wait…after a “very messy breakup” earlier in the summer, they’re “currently on much better terms,” a source told E! News.

July 25, 2019

And then, well, there’s this, posted by Lili:
https://www.instagram.com/p/B0WOffWgXJk
What do we know?

August 4, 2019

Lili took to Instagram to wish Cole a happy birthday with a romantic poem.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B0u84u1AH_U/
So, we might never know the truth about this intensely private couple. Sometimes they sit together, sometimes they don’t; sometimes they let the public in, and sometimes they don’t. No matter what, what we’ll always be Bughead stans.

Tags image-heavy list, social

Trending

The Dark Side of DNA: How Genetic Tests Expose Family Secrets (And Why They're Not Perfect)

Post author By HealthyWay Staff Writer
Post date July 12, 2019

If you’re curious about your heritage, you can always take one of those trendy DNA tests. Sites like 23andMe and AncestryDNA offer users the opportunity to take a closer look at their genetics, and by all accounts, they’re largely accurate. There’s no easier way to find out if you truly have Scandinavian heritage, or if you’re Irish enough to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day guilt free.
In 2017 alone, about 12 million Americans purchased genetic genealogy tests. That means around 1 out of every 25 American adults have access to detailed genetic information—and, by all accounts, that number is going up.
However, there’s a dark side to online genetic tests: They occasionally unearth uncomfortable information. In fact, the major DNA testing sites explicitly warn their users about that possibility.

“You may discover unexpected facts about yourself or your family when using our services,” Ancestry.com’s privacy page warns. “Once discoveries are made, we can’t undo them.”
Granted, these situations are rare, but when they occur, they have life-altering consequences. We looked into a few cases where people received results they weren’t expecting (and what happened next).

1. A woman learns that she has more in common with her husband than she’d anticipated.

Liane Kupferberg Carter met her husband Marc during a vacation in Nassau. It was a storybook romance—or, as she described it in a piece for The Cut, “rom-com cute.”
“I was 25; he was two years older,” she wrote. “Initially, he was chasing my roommate. We struck up an intense conversation on the plane home, and by the time we landed at JFK, I had the unbidden thought, ‘I could marry a guy like this.’”
Spoiler alert: She married him. After arriving home, Liane discovered that Marc lived one block away from her Manhattan apartment. Flash forward a few years, and they were planning their lives together. They tied the knot, and everyone lived happily ever after.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BSbz-HRgSA_/
Well, sort of. 38 years later, Liane signed up for 23andMe, and one day, she received an email: “You have new DNA relatives.”
The relative in question was her husband, Marc. He was her third cousin.
Before you get all creeped out, it’s important to know that third cousins don’t have a significantly higher risk of birth abnormalities than totally unrelated people. In fact, one Icelandic study showed that third- or fourth-cousin couples tend to be well suited biologically and typically have more kids than other couples.
There’s even some research suggesting that first cousins’ risks are only a few percentage points higher than other couples (and cousin marriage was fairly common throughout history—Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, and Edgar Allan Poe all married their cousins, and we certainly don’t look at them like they’re rogue Game of Thrones characters).
https://twitter.com/HistoryInPics/status/1122123643528654848
One of Carter’s children has an epileptic disorder and autism, but there’s no clear link between the couple’s genetic similarity and the boy’s conditions.
While Liane admits that her unexpected genealogical revelation gave her some pause, she never doubted that her husband was the right man for her.
“I don’t need the imprimatur of 23andMe to tell me what I already know with bone-deep certainty: our connection is a decades’ long conversation that continues to nurture and sustain us both,” she wrote.
In other words, she’s, uh, glad she married her cousin.

2. A woman gets a DNA test for Christmas (and loses her sense of identity).

Linda Ketchum of Glendale, California received an AncestryDNA test from her husband as a Christmas present. Per a report in The New York Post, she wasn’t expecting much; she simply wanted to trace back her heritage.
“My dad was German, and my mother was Scottish-English,” she told the paper. “I thought it’d be fun to learn a little about my genetic ethnicity, to trace how all the pieces came together.”

Unfortunately, the results were fairly dramatic. Ketchum discovered that she had no biological link to her father whatsoever. Instead, she had numerous connections to Hispanic people in the site’s database.
“At first I didn’t believe it,” she said. “But then I kept re-checking it, and I realized, ‘Oh my God, does this mean I’m…I’m Hispanic!’”

Her real biological father was a man of Hispanic descent. As both of her parents were deceased, she had nowhere to turn for answers.
“All these years I thought I was German on my dad’s side, but all of a sudden it was dawning on me that my dad wasn’t my real dad and I had an entirely different ethnicity.”
Ketchum told the paper that she was fairly traumatized. She lost her identity, and she began wondering whether she was related to random Hispanic people she saw on the street. She eventually tracked down her real biological father, Bill Chavez, who lived in New Mexico. He had also passed away, so she wasn’t able to connect with him.

Ketchum’s story doesn’t have a happy ending, per se, but she’s at peace with the discovery. Still, she frequently thinks about the family she never met.
“I still wonder sometimes, would my life have been different if I’d known this earlier?” she said. “My real father, my actual grandparents, they all spoke fluent Spanish. I can’t even speak a word of it!”

3. A CNBC anchor receives shocking information (and ends up writing a book).

Journalist Bill Griffeth took a DNA test in 2012, hoping to learn more about his European ancestors. He’d had an ongoing interest in genealogy—he’s on the board of Boston’s New England Historic Genealogical Society—and he had even written a book about his ancestors’ journey to the United States. Griffeth was extremely proud of his family, and when his cousin asked him to participate in genetic testing to get more information about their family origins, he happily agreed.

BostonGlobe: After taking a DNA test, Bill Griffeth's life was changed by "a deep dark family secret" … pic.twitter.com/ITx23Wl39H

— JamesRoy SFHEA #FBPE (@JamesRoy) September 14, 2016

Hey, he’s part of this article, so you probably know where this is going. The test showed that Griffeth had no biological relation to his late father. When he received word via email, he was crushed.
“My body responded before my brain could,” Griffeth wrote in his memoir The Stranger in My Genes. “I experienced a strange sensation of ﬂoating, and I could no longer feel the chair I was sitting in or the Blackberry I was holding. My breathing became labored and shallow and I heard a roaring in my ears like ocean waves crashing off in the distance.”
Initially, Griffeth denied the results, insisting that the company that tested his DNA had made some mistake. He actually went on the air on CNBC within hours of receiving the news and acted as though nothing had happened. For months, he refused to accept reality.
Eventually, the truth set in: His mother had had an affair, which she’d hidden from her family for decades. He eventually decided to confront her with the information.

Park Ridge TV Journalist: A DNA Test Changed My Life: PARK RIDGE, N.J. — Bill Griffeth of Park Ridge, co-anchor of… https://t.co/Wn4EBQ2vOA pic.twitter.com/i5dgrbvfqe

— Bergen County News (@BergenCtyNews) February 17, 2017

“There was a time when I said, ‘I don’t want to pursue this any further, I don’t want to trouble Mom with it,’” Griffeth told the Extreme Genes podcast. “But as my brother said, ‘What if you want answers eventually and she’s gone, what are you going to do? And what about your children, they’re going to need answers down the road?’”
“We really needed to know the truth, so I presented her with the DNA evidence, and she took it like a champ. She admitted that she had made a mistake when she was younger, and that was that.”
These days, Griffeth is at peace with his family history. He doesn’t discuss the matter with his mother, but when he decided to write a book about his experience, she gave him her blessing.
https://twitter.com/BillGriffeth/status/1163861832643293185
“We don’t talk about it anymore,” he said. “…She’s of a different generation, a different time.”
Since going public with his story, Griffeth has heard from dozens of people about their own DNA testing mishaps. He says his perspective has gradually changed; he knows if his mother hadn’t made her “mistake,” he wouldn’t be here, and he takes comfort in knowing his situation isn’t unique.
“The only takeaway I can have from this is to be grateful about it,” he said. “…I encourage anybody, if you’re going through this, reach out. It’ll be a difficult first step, but you gotta be able to tell somebody.”
“I just think that DNA testing is going to have a profound impact, not only on biotechnology and medicine—it’s already having an impact there—but I think it’s going to have a profound impact on our social culture.”

4. A woman gets a doctor-ordered DNA test, with tragic results.

While many people get DNA tests to learn about their hereditary history, some choose to get tested for medical reasons. Certain hereditary conditions have genetic markers that can help doctors diagnose, prevent, and even cure diseases before they become life threatening. In fact, many direct-to-consumer DNA testing services like 23andMe offer specialized tests for these genetic markers—but they warn that people shouldn’t make medical decisions based on their screenings.
Maureen Boesen has a family history of cancer, and she and her two sisters entered a university study to determine whether or not they had a BRCA gene mutation that would raise her risk of developing the disease.
Boesen tested positive.

Hindsight in 20/20! Hopefully this message helps other women from enduring the same.

— Maureen Boesen (@mamabearboesen) February 21, 2019

“It was just devastating because I knew what breast cancer and ovarian cancer can do to a family,” she told KSHB in Kansas City. “The first question out of my mouth was, ‘Is there any chance this could be wrong?’ And the researcher said ‘No.’”
To limit her chances of developing cancer, Boesen underwent a preventive double mastectomy at 23. Years later, she also decided to undergo a complete hysterectomy, but prior to that procedure, doctors performed another test.

Hi! The purpose of this article is to encourage women to be advocates for their health. If it saves the life of one person, it will be worth it. Sharing experiences like this isn’t easy but I’m hopeful it’ll encourage women to be vocal about their health.

— Maureen Boesen (@mamabearboesen) February 21, 2019

“I was at work, and the first thing [the doctor] said was, ‘We need to talk,’” she recalled. “And my heart just sank. And she said, ‘You’re negative!’ and I just started bawling. I was angry. I was regretful. I was happy. I was sad.”
According to the U.S. Preventive Service Task Force’s recommendations for BRCA testing, doctors should screen some women with cancer in their family histories, but false positives occur occasionally. It’s unclear why Boesen’s physicians didn’t re-test her before carrying out her double mastectomy, but her story is a good indication of how genetic tests can be misleading—and why a second opinion is always helpful when making serious medical decisions.
“I wish what I had been told was, ‘If you don’t trust it, get another test,’” Boesen said. “But that’s not what I was told, and my life could have been so different.”

5. A woman finds out a secret about her family…but decides to do some investigating.

Kristen Brown received a shock when her aunt sent off for a commercial DNA test: According to the results, Brown’s grandfather wasn’t a full-blooded Syrian. That led to a small family scandal.
“If we weren’t who we thought we were, well, then, who were we?” Brown wrote for Gizmodo.

But to Brown, something didn’t seem right. She suspected that the test was inaccurate, so she mailed DNA samples to three major commercial DNA testers…and received extremely different results from each.
She’s not the only one. In 2018, reporter Rafi Letzler took nine DNA tests from three companies and received six distinctly different results. Even when a single company performs a test multiple times, the results can change dramatically.
How could that happen? For starters, those heritage estimates (think “you’re 9 percent Scandinavian” and other such results) are just that—estimates—and they’re not as accurate as you might assume.
To determine users’ heritage, sites compare the DNA of all of the people who’ve already taken the test. If a person’s genetic makeup is more similar to, say, the DNA of Scandinavian users, the service will conclude that the user has some Scandinavian heritage.

However, the services can only work with whatever data is available. Heritage estimates will vary from one site to the next—if the site has a lot of Italian users, it’s more likely to provide accurate heritage estimates for people with Italian backgrounds, and conversely, if the site’s database doesn’t have many Middle Eastern samples to use as a comparison point, it will have trouble accurately determining the heritage of a person with a Middle Eastern background.
“Your DNA is only part of what determines who you are, even if the analysis of it is correct,” Brown wrote. “…If the messaging of consumer DNA companies more accurately reflected the science, though, it might be a lot less compelling: Spit in a tube and find out where on the planet it’s statistically probable that you share ancestry with today.”
That’s not to say that commercial genetic tests are worthless; they can provide some useful information about heritage, and they can accurately determine relationships between different users.
But if you assume that the tests are perfect, the results are in: You’re 99 percent naive.

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“Before I Lived With You, Mommy…": When Children Speak Of Past Lives

Post author By HealthyWay Staff Writer
Post date June 25, 2019

“We were out on a shopping trip when my daughter, Lilly, turned to me,” says Julie, a 32-year-old mother in St. Louis. “She pointed at one of the cars in the parking lot. She said, ‘That car hit me.’”
For Julie, it was an unusual situation; she knew for certain that 4-year-old Lilly hadn’t been hit by any vehicles (that’s the sort of thing a mother would remember).
“I asked her what she meant. She said, ‘Before I lived with you and Daddy, I lived with another Mommy and Daddy.’ My blood ran cold.”

Over the next hour or two, Lilly spouted off other details about her “death.” She’d seen a red car; she remembered ambulances. Her feet hurt. With every new recollection, Julie became more uncomfortable.
“It was freaky, in the way that kid stuff can be really freaky,” she says. “There’s a reason that horror movies use creepy little kids. I was weirded out.”
That’s a fairly natural reaction when your child tells you they’re living their second life. However, Julie’s situation isn’t actually that unusual—and some researchers believe this sort of “reincarnation” has a scientific explanation.

What if we’re all reincarnated? What if we remember bits of our past lives in our current lives, but as we get older, we start to forget about the people we used to be?
We decided to look into the science of reincarnation memories. Strap in, because this gets pretty weird.

One thing’s for sure: Many children seem to recount past lives.

We couldn’t find exact statistics—it’s not the type of thing you’d find in a Pew Research poll—but we easily found a few parents whose kids told stories like Lilly’s. Their stories are remarkably similar; they’re going about their normal business when suddenly, their kid remarks on a memory.
“When my daughter was around four years old, she told me that she had died and gone up to the stars and the moon,” Jill Howell, a licensed professional counselor, tells HealthyWay. “I am very open to [the concept of reincarnation], so I calmly asked her questions (though I was so excited to hear this).”
Howell began to believe her daughter was recounting real memories when the girl brought up specific details about her “death.”

“She told me that she was in a store and reaching for something on a shelf and she fell,” Howell says. “She stated that her kids were there telling her that she needed to come back, so she did. A few years later, she denied it and said that she made it up, but you can’t make up something that you have never been exposed to.”

To Howell, that was evidence that reincarnation could be real. How could her daughter invent specific details about a death when she wasn’t mature enough to understand the concept?
“We had never discussed the possibility of afterlife, [and] she knew nothing about death at all,” she tells us. “Children don’t have filters. Society teaches people to filter and to deny. Developmentally, kids want approval and won’t say things that sound out of the ordinary.”
To Howell, that’s a crucial point; kids don’t have a clear incentive to make up these types of stories. In many cases, the act of recounting the memories is traumatic or uncomfortable.
Of course, kids also have incredible imaginations, so some of these stories are easily explained. Howell’s child may have seen a report on the news about someone falling, then developed her “memory” after the fact. She might have imagined that she had kids because she’d been playing with dolls recently. We can’t know what was going through her head at the time.

That’s the standard, logical explanation for this type of memory. Some kids might want to recall specific details in order to seek approval from adults, and that need for approval can be a powerful thing. Research shows that children’s memories are suggestible; their brains encode memories differently than adult brains, and kids are more likely to create false memories after a single suggestive interview.
In other words, if an adult asks a child, “What do you remember from your past life?”, the child will likely come up with something—even if they don’t actually remember anything. That effect could account for many purported reincarnation memories; kids remark on an event they imagined, and an adult asks them to give more details, at which point the child invents those details while wholeheartedly believing they’re recounting real events.
That’s the most reasonable explanation for the phenomena. There is, however, another possibility.

Some psychologists wonder whether reincarnation actually exists—and how it’d fit in with current science.

Jim Tucker, MD, is the director of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia. He’s studied childhood reincarnation memories for decades, and he’s a respected member of the psychiatric community—in other words, he’s not a New Age guy sitting in a room full of crystals.

He’s a member of the scientific establishment, albeit a controversial figure in that community. That’s important to keep in mind when you consider his thoughts on reincarnation.
“I think when I started looking at things, I became open to the possibility that we’re more than just our physical bodies, that there is more to the world than just the physical universe,” Tucker told The San Francisco Gate in 2006.
Tucker believes that reincarnation could exist, and he uses case studies of kids’ past-life memories as his evidence. As he told the newspaper, he looks at a variety of indicators to determine whether reincarnation memories are potentially legitimate.
“Many [kids with reincarnation memories], three-quarters of them, will talk about the way that they died,” Tucker said. “And usually what they say will focus on things that happened near the end of the previous life—not exclusively, but they will usually talk about people they knew at the end. So if they are describing a life as an adult, they will be much more likely to talk about a spouse or children than about parents and that sort of thing.”

When an experience seems legitimate, Tucker’s team looks for evidence that lines up with the details in the child’s memories. He believes physical details could eventually make a realistic case for reincarnation (and he’s written a well-received book on that subject, by the way).
For decades, his team has been assembling evidence to show that some kids are recounting true memories—not fantasies.
“We look at whether there are any behaviors or birthmarks that link to the ‘deceased’ person, and if we identify a previous person whose life seems to match that description, we get the details of that life as carefully as possible to see just how well things match up,” he said.

Some real-life cases add credence to Tucker’s claims.

Take the case of the teenage boy who seemingly remembered a past life when visiting his parents’ hometown in India (first reported in National Post in 2009; this link to an archive of the original report).

The boy—unnamed in the case due to his age—suddenly had strong memories of his past life and said that he saw his parents as “aliens.” His memories matched up with descriptions of a man who lived in the Indian town of Jaipur; a psychiatrist who interviewed the boy found no signs of mental illness and noted that the child recalled events “with a strong, emotionally charged tone.”
Tucker has also investigated dozens of cases in which children who recalled traumatic deaths had birthmarks that corresponded with wounds incurred in these stories. Of course, there’s a logical explanation for that phenomenon: Kids might see their birthmarks, then imagine events that led to those birthmarks.
Still, Tucker’s convinced that some of the cases are legitimate; when kids mention extremely specific details that line up with real-world events, he believes the logical explanation is that their memories are authentic.

“If it’s a case where the statements aren’t verified, then it may well be just fantasy—like the boy who said, ‘I used to drive a big truck,’ he told The San Francisco Gate. “If you have got one where the children have made numerous statements about another life that is quite some distance away, including proper names and everything else, and it all checks out, then unless you are going to say, ‘It’s all one heck of a coincidence,’ you can’t really just blame all of that on fantasy.”

Cases of possible reincarnation tend to have common characteristics.

According to Tucker, reincarnation memories tend to start when a child is about 3 years old. The memories usually leave around age 6 or 7, but occasionally, adults report remembering past lives. In many cases, children remember violent or unusual deaths, but Tucker says that’s not true for all of the cases he’s studied.
Despite his research, Tucker says that reincarnation isn’t part of his personal belief system. He’s open to the possibility, but he’s trying to maintain a scientific perspective. To that end, he believes that quantum physics could explain reincarnation—again, if the phenomenon actually exists.

“Quantum physicists talk about electrons, or events being potential, rather than actual physical entities,” he said. “So that there are various potentials, basically until somebody looks, and then it sort of forces the universe to make a determination about which potential is going to be actualized.”
In an interview with Skeptiko, Tucker expanded on that concept:

“Well, if that is the case, then we would not expect an individual consciousness to end when a physical brain dies. And our cases, of course, provide evidence that in fact consciousness does not end and that it continues on. And [in my book], I explore and speculate that if you use that metaphor, what might we say about existence after we die? …So it is an idea that I think is worth exploring.”

Tucker’s approach is ultimately very simple: Keep an open mind to the possibility of reincarnation, and science might be able to eventually prove it exists. Then again, all of the reincarnated memories might simply be coincidence—until someone actually studies the phenomenon with that perspective, we can’t really know. That’s what his team is trying to accomplish.

“You can’t just map these cases, obviously, on a materialist understanding of the world,” he told Skeptiko. “But I think if you stop and consider it is not just that the world is primary, and sort of consciousness is bouncing from one life to the next or whatever.”
“I don’t think that is how it works. But if you consider that consciousness is the primary thing and then this world that we see is just a creation of that consciousness, then it does give a different perspective of trying to understand what this is all about.”

Obviously, Tucker’s theories are extremely controversial.

Skeptics note that some famous cases of “reincarnated children” can be easily explained.
Take, for example, the case of James Leininger, who garnered headlines at an early age when he vividly remembered a plane crash that took place during World War II. James suffered from vivid nightmares, and when recounting them to his parents, he’d say things like, “Airplane crash on fire, little man can’t get out.”
That prompted his parents to reach out to counselor Carol Bowman, who took the boy seriously. Eventually, Bowman and James’ parents publicized the story, making the case that James was the reincarnation of a World War II pilot named James Huston, Jr.

After all, the boy remembered incredible details; he remembered the word “Natoma,” and Huston was stationed on the U.S.S. Natoma Bay aircraft carrier. The child pointed out Iwo Jima on a map and told his father that “that is where my plane was shot down.” He remembered the names of specific aircraft.
But as skeptic Brian Dunning noted for Skeptoid, James had been fascinated with aircraft and military history before recounting his past life.
“All of the evidence is purely anecdotal, and is practically the gold standard of confirmation bias and observational selection,” Dunning wrote. “The story as the public knows it was written by the parents themselves after nearly a decade of personally trying to confirm and prove their belief. Reading their book, I marveled that the only proof they gave over and over again is that there is no way a three-year-old could have had knowledge of aircraft carriers or known the names of specific fighter planes. That’s an insult to every three-year-old who ever lived.”

Dunning claimed that James’ parents unintentionally helped the boy add details to his “memories” in order to justify their hypothesis. He also blamed Bowman for emphasizing the possibility of reincarnation—perhaps to the detriment of her young patient.
“The notion that James had been reincarnated was never his own,” Dunning wrote. “It was his parents’, primarily Andrea’s, own idea. The parents, under the guidance of a strongly motivated self-described ‘therapist’, put the idea into his head themselves.”

So, it seems like your kid is reincarnated. What do you do now?

Let’s say that your kid seems to remember a past life. How can you address their feelings about those memories—false or not—in a healthy manner?
To some extent, that depends on your personal beliefs. Howell recommends a measured approach.

“I would say to be nonreactive and to just listen and to never, ever question the validity of what they are saying to you, because that will erode any trust that they have for you,” she says.
By the same token, parents shouldn’t tell their kids that their memories are legitimate. They should simply listen—and if the memories are loaded with overwhelming specific details, or if they’re clearly traumatizing the child, parents should contact a psychologist.
If you’re the type of person who believes in reincarnation, Jim Tucker’s contact information is here. If you’re skeptical of the idea of past lives, any other licensed child psychologist should be able to point you in the right direction.
We asked Julie how she’ll respond to Lilly’s memories of a past life.

“I don’t actually believe that my child is possessed, or reincarnated, or whatever,” she says. “I just listen, say, ‘That’s nice,’ and we go about our day. She also has imaginary friends, and I don’t think they’re real, either.”
But what if reincarnation is real? What if it’s an actual scientific phenomenon—something real and tangible, explained by some obscure law of quantum physics?
“I don’t care,” Julie says with a laugh. “She’s still Lilly, and her past lives won’t affect how I’m raising her. If there’s a few other people in there, I guess I love them all.”

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Parents Reveal The Most Embarrassing Things Their Kids Have Said In Public

Post author By HealthyWay Staff Writer
Post date February 28, 2019

Kids say the darndest things. They also say the cringe-iest things. They hear everything, they remember, and they repeat. Think about that next time you’re tempted to drop an f-bomb in front of a toddler.
Anyway, when kids veer off-script, it can be humiliating—but it can also be highly entertaining. Parents can spin that embarrassment into comedic gold. All they have to do is tell the story.

That’s what a bunch of face-palming parents gathered to do on Reddit, in response to a question about the “most embarrassing” things kids have said in public. We edited the best of them for grammar and readability.
Do yourself a favor and keep reading. Every parent will cringe in sympathy. Non-parents might just decide to stay that way. But we can all agree that these stories are painfully hilarious.

“Daddy, why are the police here?”

Social mores are not a toddler’s strong point.
“In a McDonald’s, my son saw two police officers,” wrote thatdan23. “His comment: ‘Daddy, why are the police here? They don’t eat hamburgers, they eat donuts.’”

“One of [the police officers] was not amused.”
Somehow, the embarrassing comments kids make often seem directed right at the parents.
“[I was] carrying my daughter back from the bathroom through a crowded hipster brunch spot while she shouted ‘He farted!’ at every single table,” wrote flippenzee. “In case there was any confusion, she was also pointing at my face.”
At least that kid didn’t imply something worse, like this next one.
“In the middle of the DMV, my 2-year-old sniffed my butt and said ‘Poops!’ because we always do that to her when checking her diaper,” wrote a Reddit user with a since-deleted account.
Of course, kids usually don’t mean to embarrass their parents. Sometimes they don’t even mean to use inappropriate language.
“[I] had my son in a doctor’s office waiting room,” wrote another Reddit user. “There was a large clock on the wall. We had just taught him what a clock was, so anytime he saw one he would get excited.”

“He started pointing and yelling, ‘Clock! I see the clock, look at the clock!’”
That doesn’t sound too bad. What’s the catch?
“He was also 2 years old and couldn’t pronounce his ‘L’ yet,” concluded the Reddit user.
Oh. Oh dear.

“We can punch a stranger!”

Where do kids come up with this stuff?
“My oldest daughter and I used to run away from my wife when we went shopping,” wrote openletter8. “One time, we got particularly far away, and I asked her what do you wanna do now that Mom can’t stop us?”

“She exclaimed loudly, near others, ‘We can punch a stranger!’”
No, no you cannot. Here are a few more head-scratchers:
“My daughter is an only child and has an imaginary sister and brother,” wrote adreamaway1. “And she will tell her preschool teachers or strangers things like, ‘We left my sister at home alone,’ or, ‘My brother died.’”

That went dark quickly. Moving on…
“I was in Subway with my 3-year-old daughter,” wrote Shokker88. “A very large man came in behind us, and he had a stomach that hung down past his shirt.”
“My daughter saw this and said, ‘I see someone’s belly,’ and went forward to tickle it before I stopped her. It was a game we played at home where I would tickle her belly … ”

“I want that f***in’ truck.”

Remember, kids are little sponges. If you use profanity around them, they will pick that language up. Then they will deploy it in the most awkward situations they can find.
“My friend’s [2-year-old] daughter saw another kid in the grocery store with a toy truck, and out of nowhere says, “I want that f***in’ truck…” in an angry tone,” wrote thebroklahoman.

“[It’s] not the funniest thing to read, I know, but we’ve been saying that in a baby voice for the last few years, and it always cracks us up.”
This was far from a one-time experience. Here’s another kid who learned to drop f-bombs before being potty-trained.
“My cousin called a wardrobe a ‘f***ing wardrobe’ for around a year,” wrote RainingBlood398. “The wardrobe had fallen on her younger sister (thankfully not doing any lasting damage), and her dad, hearing the bang, ran into the room and screamed, ‘That f***ing wardrobe!’”
“My cousin assumed that was it’s correct name.”
These things have been going on for generations.
“Great-grandpa was 12 before he found out those animals they kept weren’t called ‘damn-sheep,’” wrote eritain.

One more:
“When I was little, for some reason, at Thanksgiving dinner, while everyone was saying what they were thankful for, I yelled,”I am thankful for this G*******d dinner!” wrote zBrettz. “I then proceeded to stuff my mouth.”

“I did not stick around to see the reaction of the cashier.”

Kids don’t know the stakes. You can’t just assume they’ll know what will embarrass their parents, or, worse, get them arrested.
“When babysitting my young cousin, she ran through the store yelling, ‘You’re not my daddy!’ as I chased her telling her to stop running,” wrote I_am_number_one. “Target security didn’t like that too much. It embarrasses her now that she’s older because I like to remind her about it constantly.”
Stores are dangerous for people with kids. Inevitably, our little angels will come up with something that makes you look like a bad parent, or worse.

“Just last week walking out of a store, my 3-year-old turned to the cashier and said, ‘I farted in your store,’” wrote KittenHobbes. “Just like he was saying the sky was blue. [I] did not stick around to see the reaction of the cashier.”
It’s not just the grocery store that parents of young children have to worry about. It is everywhere.
“After his little sister was born, my toddler announced to the parking garage that [her sister] ‘came out of mommy’s magina!’” wrote boneandbrine. “So that was nice …”
Nice indeed.

“Is that my daddy?”

From the mouths of babes…whatever that’s supposed to mean.
“My 4-year-old nephew [screamed] at my brother, ‘Dad, stop acting like a child!’ at some big family event,” wrote aminice. “It was absolutely clear to everyone present he picked it up from the mother scolding my brother in private. He really had a point, though.”
Kids don’t always clarify their meaning. They just say what they’re thinking.
“My son came home from kindergarten with his backpack full of canned food,” wrote twillsteele. “When pressed about the issue, he confidently stated that he had told the teacher he was hungry, and we didn’t have any food at home!”

“They sent him home with the donations for those in need! We got him to return the food the next day. It’s a funny story we tell now, but talk about embarrassed!”
Finally, there’s the weird mind of the 2-year-old. They make associations that the rest of us never would.
“My husband is a police officer,” wrote IWantALargeFarva. “When my oldest was 2, she would point to every officer in uniform and ask, ‘Is that my daddy?’ It was so embarrassing.”
Sounds like.

“Santa isn’t real.”

Things get really tricky when family beliefs butt heads with the broader culture.
“My son is full of embarrassing stories,” wrote killjennyproductions. “We told him about Santa not being real because he was terrified of Santa and cried night after night, screaming that ‘the evil Santa pirate was going to come into his house and mess with his things.’”
“Being 4, he didn’t understand our warnings not to tell other children. At Chick-fil-A one day, a kid comes running out of the play area, crying that some kid was telling them that Santa wasn’t real.”
“I rush in, aiming for damage control, and hear my boy finishing his lecture: ‘Santa isn’t real, and Jesus isn’t real. I am Jesus!’”

“Chick-fil-A asked us not to return.”
Wow. Chick-fil-A, of all places. Anyway, this sort of culture clash can pop up just about anywhere.
“My niece asked my sister in church, ‘Mommy, when are you going to poop out the baby Geegus?’” wrote deedaree.
Sometimes it’s nice not to be a parent.

“She’s a witch!”

You can tell this next one is going to go wrong from the very start.
“When my kid was a toddler, and just learning how to tell men from women, he liked yell out his verdict,” wrote DevonianAge. “One day, we were in a cafe, and he decided to practice.”
“’Mama, you’re a woman,’ he said.”
“‘That’s right, honey.’”
“‘And Papa is a man!’”

“He was pointing and talking loudly so that people noticed and started watching. No problem, it was cute. He labeled a couple of strangers next, talking loudly because he liked the attention. But then he pointed to an old woman across the room.”
“’And she’s a witch!’”
“In his defense, she was, in fact, an old hippie, and she was dressed … in long flowing scarves, etc. I don’t know if she heard him since I shushed him real fast (though a lot of other people definitely did), but she did come over later to introduce herself and meet the kids.”
“This was the kind of place where it’s normal to chat with strangers, so I don’t think this was necessarily a sign she heard us. Her name was Adina. I thought that was a pretty good witch name, so ever since then that’s been our family’s stock name when making up a story featuring a witch.”

“We don’t pick our nose, man.”

Kids see everything. Then they make comments.
“I have a 2-and-a-half-year-old, and so this just happened the other day,” wrote diciteco. “At a baseball game, I’m carrying my daughter so that her head is resting on my shoulder.”
“Suddenly she pokes her head up, looks directly at the man behind me, and says: ‘We don’t pick our nose, man. I said, we don’t pick our nose. No thank you!’”
“I didn’t turn around, instead saying that we only say that to people in our family … My daughter is very outgoing … [I’m] looking forward to plenty more embarrassing moments with complete strangers.”

Speaking of baseball, there’s this:
“When I was 4 years old, my dad took me to a baseball game,” wrote Tgs91. “Phillies vs. Padres. He takes me to the bathroom and there’s a guy with an eyepatch. Staring at the guy, I loudly ask my father, ‘Dad, I thought we were playing the Padres today?’”
“Dad replies, ‘We are.’”
“I point at the guy, while … next to him at a urinal [and say,] ‘Then why is he dressed like a pirate?’”
“My dad was barely able to stop laughing long enough to apologize.”
We can relate.

“I was the best pooper at Disney World that day.”

Here’s one that speaks for itself. We certainly don’t want to speak for it.
“[I] took my 3-year-old to Disney World,” wrote Explodo86. “Of course, after about an hour in the park, both I and the offspring have to go to the bathroom. We head off to one of the main bathrooms right next to the castle.”

“I let the boy go first … then I of course sit down and perform my own glorious No. 2 … ”
“At this point, the child starts saying in a voice that can only be described as booming, ‘Good job, daddy! You’re the best pooper I know!’”
“This of course led to chuckles from the long line of stalls populated by other fathers. The chuckles ended up turning into outright laughter. I was so proud of my pooping abilities.”
“Well, I’m somewhat shameless, so I clean up and go wash my hands to find that I’m now getting the nods of approval from everyone in the can who heard the interchange. I was the best pooper at Disney World that day…and internally embarrassed and entertained at the same time.”
“Embarrassed and entertained at the same time.” That sounds like a fair description of parenthood, at least until the kids get a bit older.

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