Every day we do hundreds of stupid things - in the kitchen, in the bathroom, in the bedroom and at the desk. For some reason, we forcefully rub ourselves with a washcloth, buy orthopedic mattresses and are afraid of going blind from constantly working at the computer. From this book you will learn how to live according to science and not die prematurely. Debunking myths on every page! - We don’t need antibacterial soap - But we need to choose toothpaste wisely, otherwise we’ll have to treat our teeth later - Because of improper hand washing, we get ARVI more often - Water filters can harm us - The toilet seat is cleaner than it seems, but the carpet is not very - It’s a terrible pity, but kissing pets is still not worth it. Medical journalist Daria Sargsyan tried to understand our everyday behavior from the point of view of evidence-based medicine: what is good for us, what is absolutely not, and what makes no sense at all. “Why is this and not otherwise?” is her favorite question. This is the third, expanded and corrected, edition of the book. Science does not stand still, scientists continue their research and publish new articles, so Daria re-checked all the facts, refreshed scientific information and rewrote the chapter “About Air”. Let this book become your desk book, and also be studied in life safety classes, distributed in medical institutions, passed from hand to hand and help you live. About the author Daria Sargsyan is a medical journalist, popularizer of evidence-based medicine, editor of the Meduza publication and co-founder of the multi-thousand telegram channel “Namochi Mantu”. Reviews The book is worth reading not so much as an instruction on whether tap water is dangerous and whether it is possible to do without a filter; Is scale in a kettle dangerous? Is it harmful to drink five cups of coffee a day (spoiler: it’s not harmful) - how much as a therapy for urban fears: it turns out that so many of the things that we are so hysterically afraid of are actually not at all scary. In general, read Sargsyan more and listen to the Internet less. Lisa Birger, literary critic Drawing on hundreds of studies, Dasha explains how to wash your hands, brush your teeth, protect yourself from STDs, how to eat, drink and sleep. The book really describes the ideal (as the current development of science understands it) to which we must strive in order to reduce the risks of health problems. I would be glad if this book was rewritten and reprinted every few years in accordance with the latest data. Fedor Katasonov, pediatrician, author of the popular telegram channel "Fediatrics" 3rd edition, corrected and expanded.
Book " Killer wallpaper, poisonous water and a seductive chair. How to survive in your own apartment"The author Daria Sargsyan was rated by KnigoGuide visitors, and her reader rating was 10.00 out of 10.
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Intriguing name, isn't it?
I was looking for a book for a long time so that everything would be collected in a heap, some useful tips housekeeping, cleaning and catering.
Finally, she was found. Daria Sargsyan is a journalist, I read one of her books, I liked it. But again, there are as many opinions as there are doctors, so you don’t need to trust her 100%.
The book "Killer Wallpaper, Poisonous Water and the Seductive Chair" is based on scientific research that can be found on American websites.
Let me tell you about interesting facts from book.
I read the book in electronic version. Sometimes beautiful pink pictures with the contents of the chapter run through. Lots of footnotes on every page.
So, we choose the most common soap, tar soap only as prescribed by a dermatologist.
We change the towel 1-2 times a week.
Earwax comes out of the ear the moment we chew food. Therefore, you can’t go deep. (By the way, they sell excellent ear sticks with a limiter; you won’t go further than necessary )
About black dots.
Blackheads are comedones (open blackheads), that is, a sebaceous plug in the hair follicle that, due to contact with oxygen, has oxidized and turned black. Plus there is melanin there - that is, it is not dirt that can be washed off. You can deal with blackheads by using products with benzoyl peroxide (look for it at the pharmacy) or 0.5–2% salicylic acid. This must be done for at least four to eight weeks.
In the morning, facial cleansers do not need to be used.
It is better to use a soft mechanical toothbrush, with uneven stubble.
Use oral coloring tablets to control your dental care.
There are only 4 types of toothpaste, the rest is marketing.
Fluorine in the paste must be at least 1350 ppm.
The colored stripe on the tube of paste has nothing to do with the naturalness or harmfulness of the paste))
Teeth should be brushed as soon as the first teeth appear to prevent tooth decay in childhood.
The irrigator does not remove plaque.
Throw away your washcloths and body scrubs. Maximum - pumice for heels.
We don't use air fresheners!
This is the most interesting, in my opinion, from the first chapter. The second one is no less interesting.
The chapter includes articles on sleep and contraceptives. I don’t really know why the second one is here, but the author described STDs in great detail.
Patients with HIV can sleep without protection by taking a pill, but it is expensive.
Water can be boiled as many times as you like.
Set aside water and use filters.
People with weakened immune systems can only drink boiled water.
Do not drink herbal teas in large quantities!
The book describes in detail detox and melt water, mineral water, juice, smoothies, coffee, etc. I won’t stop there; the information didn’t seem particularly useful to me.
The benefits of antioxidants have not been proven.
Finished products contain a small amount of monosodium glutamate.
GMO is safe. In general, the book contains a lot of praise for all sorts of additives, sweeteners, and preservatives. This is not the first book where I come across this. Did you know that the rice and potatoes on the market are GM products?
From the book you will learn how to properly store food in the refrigerator. I learned some important information for myself.
I find the option with cold water and a microwave convenient.
Be sure to change filters in vacuum cleaners and air conditioners, wash air purifiers, and change lamps periodically if you quartz the room.
At the computer you need to blink more often and do exercises.
Your vision doesn't deteriorate because you read or look at your phone.
Living on the 1st or 2nd floor is dangerous.
What should be in the first aid kit:
There is also a list of what should NOT be in your first aid kit.
A large section is dedicated to animals and how to avoid getting infected from them.
Rabbits and fish are considered the most harmless animals in the house.
I shared with you some interesting facts from the book in my opinion, I would like more. But what is in the book is undoubtedly important, there is something to think about. The author herself tries to live easily, and not worry about every issue. Therefore, there is no need to turn the maintenance of home life into an obsession.
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Daria Sargsyan
Killer wallpaper, poisonous water and a seductive chair. How to survive in your own apartment
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Publisher Individuum
Editor Alexey Portnov
Executive editor Alina Saidasheva
Project producer Anastasia Chukovskaya
Proofreaders Alena Merkuryeva, Natalya Vitko, Anna Vasilyeva
Editorial Director Maria Polyakova
Art design Alina Aleynikova
Photographer - Masha Kushnir
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Popular science publication
Sarkisyan, Daria Vladimirovna.
Killer wallpaper, poisonous water and a seductive chair: How to survive in your own apartment / Daria Sargsyan. - 3rd ed., rev. and additional - Moscow: Individual, 2018: ill. - (Health).
© Sargsyan D., 2018
© Individual Publishing LLC, 2018
© Afisha Company LLC, 2015, 2016
© Meduza Project, 2017
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Why do I use this particular toothbrush?
Well, it's simple and beautiful. And the bells and whistles that other brushes have are probably pure marketing, they are of no use.
Why this toothpaste?
She smells nice.
Why do I brush my teeth this way?
I'm used to it since childhood.
Why don’t I have interdental brushes, irrigators and other devices for cleaning my teeth?
Hm. Because life is too short for me to waste it on interdental brushes? I don't know, I didn't think about it.
If your answer is approximately the same, then this book is for you. Choosing the wrong toothpaste brings the day closer when your teeth will need treatment. Due to improper hand washing, you are more likely to get ARVI. Improperly defrosting meat (if room temperature, and not in the refrigerator), you increase the risk of earning food poisoning. Every day we do many little stupid things of this kind. Simply because we don’t think about it. Simply because we are used to it.
Sometimes the opposite happens. We experience fear of what is completely harmless (or almost harmless): scale, microwave or a monitor that supposedly kills vision.
I tried to understand all this from the point of view of evidence-based medicine. Evidence-based medicine is good because it has the tools to provide a reasoned answer to the question “Why?” Why do professional dental societies recommend using fluoride toothpaste? Because in well-conducted studies, this approach has proven effective in preventing tooth decay. If there were no such studies, then we would know that we know nothing. And this is also good: we would not be fooled by the ardent belief that only a paste with tea tree oil and ground pearls can protect against caries. “Where is your evidence?” - "There is none of them". However, due to the relatively small number of good studies, such verification of information is often unsupportive and leads to some confusion. But it’s still better to know that we don’t know something and come to terms with it than to blindly believe.
Together with Marianna Mirzoyan and Karina Nazaretyan - they are also medical journalists - in January 2016 we started a channel on Telegram (essentially a blog) called “Wet the Mantu”. The title may seem strange, but it has an important message. I think more or less all people who grew up in the USSR and Russia know that the manta sample cannot be wetted. This taboo sits firmly in the head, and few people even think that everything could be different. We want people to question such “well-known facts” and look for evidence. Because in the end it turns out that the mantu sample can be soaked, if you have a sore throat you even need to eat ice cream, and the meat cannot be washed before cooking.
There are not many decent sources with which you can check information. There are practically no of them in Russian, mostly in English, because there is no local medicine - there is world medicine, and the language in which doctors and scientists from all over the world share information is English. All guidelines of professional medical societies, all meeting strict requirements scientific journals- in English. Scientific articles are collected in the PubMed.com database. But the fact of publication itself, of course, is not a sign of the quality of the article, and each article must be dealt with separately; this is a rather complex process that requires certain skills. Therefore, in medical practice, the guidelines of professional societies are more often relevant: based on the analysis of scientific articles, experts recommend how to prevent, diagnose, treat, etc. These guidelines can be found on the websites of the professional organizations themselves or on ClinicalKey.com. Useful fact-checked texts about a variety of diseases and conditions can be found at UpToDate.com and Medscape.com. These are all sources for doctors, nurses and journalists. Maybe even for advanced patients. For everyone else, for example, government websites MedlinePlus.gov (USA) and NHS.uk (UK) have been created - the information there is simplified. UpToDate also has a section for patients - uptodate.com/patients. There are other sites, but MedlinePlus works as an aggregator and links to almost everything decent. Using these sources, you can find answers to most questions about health.
I wrote this book based on the sites listed above, and also talked with doctors, looked at what doctors told my foreign colleagues, and checked every fact that seemed obvious. And if, while reading, you come across some strange statement, you can always look in the footnotes and familiarize yourself with the source. Some things you just don't want to believe, and...
Killer wallpaper, poisonous water and a seductive chair. How to survive in your own apartment - description and summary, author Daria Sargsyan, read for free online on the website electronic library website
Every day we do hundreds of stupid things - in the kitchen, in the bathroom, in the bedroom and at the desk. For some reason, we effortlessly rub ourselves with a washcloth, buy orthopedic mattresses and are afraid of going blind from constant work at the computer. From this book you will learn how to live according to science and not die prematurely. Debunking myths on every page!
We don't need antibacterial soap
But you need to choose the paste wisely, otherwise you will have to treat your teeth later
Due to improper hand washing, we are more likely to get ARVI
Water filters can harm us
The toilet seat is cleaner than it looks, but the carpet, not so much
It's a terrible pity, but you still shouldn't kiss pets
Medical journalist Daria Sargsyan tried to understand our everyday behavior from the point of view of evidence-based medicine: what benefits us, what absolutely does not, and what makes no sense at all. “Why is this and not otherwise?” is her favorite question.
At the age of 20, I decided to donate blood. I thought, why not? I passed, and somehow everything worked out by itself - I became a volunteer and started going to the oncohematology department of the Russian Children's Clinical Hospital. There I saw quite a lot of problems - and this despite the fact that the Gift of Life foundation tried to plug all the holes as much as possible. And since I was a senior year student at the Faculty of Journalism and was working, I wanted to write about it. Suggested the topic of transplantation bone marrow Esquire magazine, and the editors gave the go-ahead. , became one of my first texts on a medical topic.
At the same time, I decided to take advantage of the fact that my student position had not yet been taken away from me, and began to attend lectures at other universities and other faculties of Moscow State University. Across the road from the Faculty of Journalism there are several departments of First Medical Sciences, where I also started going. I really liked the logic of the structure of the body, the logic of the structure of diseases. Biology lessons at school were not so fun and understandable. And it quickly became clear that there is a huge problem in medicine: there is no mutual understanding between doctors and patients - they are very angry with each other (despite the fact that there is either no reason for this at all, or everything can be easily fixed by just talking). And I, as a journalist, could help change the situation a little. In addition, after the journalism department, I began to feel sick of the humanities - I took up medical journalism, in which you can rely on great sources and where there is not much room for a subjective attitude on the part of the author.
Conscientiousness, meticulousness and curiosity are perhaps the main qualities of a medical journalist. Here you just need to sit on your butt every day, read a lot, look for confirmation of every fact and torment doctors with endless questions. Quite tedious work, by and large. Yes, you constantly learn a lot of new and useful things, you go to places where outsiders are not allowed in hospitals, but mostly this is routine work. Probably, the life of a special correspondent or sports journalist is much more fun and unpredictable.
However, for me personally, the most difficult thing is not the routine, but the incompetence of many colleagues. I hate talking about this because it always sounds like “everyone is an idiot, but I’m D’Artagnan,” but there are really a lot of illiterate articles. And every time I see material without a single link to sources about the fact that from the age of 30 you need to have an ultrasound of the mammary glands every year, or that acne occurs due to intestinal problems, or that multivitamins are necessary for everyone, I want to “kill” . Probably because it is to some extent personal: a kind of war in information space- I’m trying to tell one thing, and for some reason my colleagues contribute to the spread of obscurantism. And it's very painful to see. They probably act without malicious intent and sometimes don’t even understand that they are causing harm. This makes the fight even more ridiculous.
The main problem is not when the article says that a particular disease can be treated with soda and urine (it seems to me that many already understand that this is nonsense), but when it is written that certain drugs with solid names need to be used for diagnosis do a certain tomography, but if you look into it, it turns out that these are simply harmful recommendations. Ideally, of course, to protect yourself from this, you need to look for information in English and only on trusted sites. It's basically , and . Now there are a bunch of extensions that help translate individual words, sentences, or entire text on a page. And quite high quality. Yes, this, of course, makes it difficult to read, but in essence you just need to get used to it.
If I now list the minimum requirements for a good article, then I don’t know where you can find something in Russian even remotely reminiscent in scale or. Firstly, there should be links to quality sources (read: at least English-language ones, because English is the language of modern medicine). Secondly, there should be a date there: when the article was published and (ideally) when it is going to be updated. In medicine, everything changes very quickly, and, for example, a 2011 article about the treatment of hepatitis C will already be published. Plus, over time, you will learn to identify marker words that indicate poor author work. These, for example, are already quite boring. To get some basic patient education and quickly figure out these things, you can read everything.
I have two favorite friends with whom we make “Wet the Manta” - Marianna Mirzoyan and Karina Nazaretyan (jokes about the Armenian mafia have been joked for a long time). At one time, we got along precisely because we were unbearably meticulous. This does not mean that we do not make mistakes - we make mistakes because we are human, but in general we have the same approach and it helps to provide reliable information in our articles.
I mainly read Russian-language articles on medical topics on Telegram and Facebook (with the exception of ). This is, for example, the telegram channel “” of medical journalist Olya Kashubina,. On Facebook I follow pediatricians Sergei Butria, Fyodor Katasonov and infectious disease specialist Evgeniy Shcherbina. Gynecologist Tatyana Rumyantseva also has her own. There are also a lot of good doctors on Instagram, but I still can’t figure out how to use this terribly inconvenient resource for reading texts.
It seems to me that, in principle, an ordinary person should not be aware of the latest research. I'll explain now. If you just love science, read on. If you want to put this knowledge into practice, then no - I can’t recommend anything like that in Russian. Usually in news publications this is all sorts of trash like “Carrots will save you from Alzheimer’s disease” - you open it, and there is a study on mice or a study in which they found a correlation, not a cause-and-effect relationship. Even if the research is good, there are still 283 studies on the topic that no one has canceled. And you just have to go to , where articles are updated every month, to find out how this 284th study affected the big picture. There is, of course, everything there about evidence-based medicine, but this is not a major media outlet that does everything promptly and on all fronts.
It seems to me that the low level of health education in Russia is directly related to laziness and lack of understanding that you yourself are responsible for your health. So you have a headache, you go to the pharmacy and say: “Give me something for my head.” They give you some combination drug, for example citramon. Accepted - it helped. Then your head hurt again - you took it again. And if this happens often, you earn yourself abuse headache, that is, pain directly due to taking painkillers. And all because you followed the simple path, believing that the pharmacist is responsible for your health, and not you yourself. I understand, of course, I would like to live in a world where everyone does their job well and you can outsource a lot of things, but the reality is that only the person himself can be responsible for his own health. And this is difficult.
Probably, if we had such cool Russian-language sources as or, it would be easier. But both in the States and in others English speaking countries people are treated with echinacea and homeopathic medicines.
It is difficult, of course, to talk about the reasons why many people, if they feel unwell, do not want to see a doctor or go to the clinic until the last minute, but most likely the fact is that: a) you will certainly encounter rudeness - “how should I know?” where is your card”, “you weren’t standing here”, “I just need to ask”; b) you will be healed, just like your grandmother was healed. The experience of older relatives can indeed be quite sad: they were diagnosed for a long time, treated, it did not help, treated again, a lot of money and time down the drain, no health. Maybe it was the incompetence of the doctors, or maybe this was the state of medicine at that time. Now everything could change. Well, of course, if possible, it is better to go to a doctor who adheres to the principles of evidence-based medicine, and not to a random specialist in compulsory medical insurance or voluntary health insurance. By the way, I sometimes notice that people are being strangled by a toad. For example, there is a good doctor, but he works in the private sector (this happens often). Suppose a patient can pay 3,000-5,000 rubles for an appointment without any damage to his budget. But since for a long time medicine was conditionally free for him (actually, paid for by our taxes), it is psychologically difficult to give such money. However, if you think about it, there is no logic in such a decision. So you go to a random doctor, he prescribes you an MRI, ultrasound, blood and urine tests, pointless physical therapy and ten more strange drugs. As a result, you spend more than for an appointment with a competent doctor who would prescribe only what is necessary. But I think everything will change: it’s impossible to step on this rake endlessly.
In general, everything worked out by itself: I was offered it, and since I had some free time, I didn’t refuse and just did the usual journalistic work. This is how the book “Killer Wallpaper, Poisonous Water and the Seducing Chair” appeared.
I have several thousand articles saved in Pocket. If I search there for something on the word sleep, I will find a ton of good texts about all the possible and impossible aspects of this matter. American, British and Australian government organizations also do a good job of conveying some basic but very important rules to people. On their websites, for example, there are a lot of texts stating that meat does not need to be washed before cooking. Moreover, on one site there may be several pages devoted to this issue, with more or less the same content, but with slightly different wording. At first I was perplexed, and then the book came out, and every second comment under the materials about it was: “What nonsense, how can you not wash this meat?” Then I realized: yes, they decided everything correctly there. We need to make videos about this, and reminders, and FAQs, and just articles, and interviews - maybe this way people will be able to come to terms with this simple thought.
Five tips from Daria Sargsyan (after which you will want to read her book):
- Use fluoride toothpaste.
- Throw away the washcloth and antibacterial soap.
- If there is Small child and you love dogs, get a dog.
- Don't buy a filter without testing your water.
- Don't be afraid of MSG, GMOs, microwaves, toilet seats, coffee, hormonal contraception, as well as computer work and fried foods.