Debunking Medical Myths: The Eyebrow Shaving Myth

Thomas White* and Larry B. Mellick

Debunking Medical Myths: The Eyebrow Shaving Myth

In the practice of medicine, there are many precepts or beliefs commonly taught
whose actual validity has never been seriously questioned.

Consequently, there are many medical myths that will be taught
into perpetuity unless they are exposed through a careful review of the literature.

Unfortunately, just as with a “good lie” a persistent myth in medicine will
contain a modicum of truth. For example, consider the myth that bullous myringitis is caused
by mycoplasma pneumonia or the myth that testicles torsed for greater than 6 hours are rarely
salvageable.

It is true that a single case of M. pneumoniae was reported in 1967 as having

been cultured from fluid directly aspirated from a bleb.

However, subsequently, many more articles have proven that bullous myringitis
is simply a component of severe acute otitis media caused by the typical agents of that condition.

Likewise, while there are cases of testicular torsion presenting with dead testicles
at six hours or less from onset; there are scores of reports describing hundreds of patients whose
torsed testicles survived unscathed far beyond that six hour time frame.

Unfortunately, the perpetuation of myths in medicine does have very real clinical consequences.
The shaving of eyebrows has long been a clinical taboo.

When a patient has a facial laceration or some other facial trauma involving
or near the eyebrow, clinicians have classically been taught not to shave the eyebrow
for fear that the hair will not grow back or will grow back
abnormally.

Emerg Med Open J. 2015; 1(2): 31- 33. doi: 10.17140/EMOJ-1-107

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