I think if you can get anyone who attended college to be honest with you, there was likely a moment in their life where they considered going to medical school--either because a parent was a doctor, or someone in the family had suggested it, or maybe (like me) they just really enjoyed "playing doctor" when they were little. (Take that for what it's worth. I'm not elaborating.) Indeed for a short time I, too, was one of those medical hopefuls--I excelled in biology and chemistry in high school and really loved chem lab in college, but I just wasn't cut out to make it through medical school and likely would've inadvertently killed numerous people by now, had I somehow not been weeded out en route to obtaining my M.D.

All of this notwithstanding, I still retained my interest in medicine through college, and still consider myself to be something of a "disease whiz" (even though that sounds horrible). I delight in using words and phrases like "diverticulosis," "tempromandibular joint syndrome" and "acetylsalicylic acid" when I can. So you can imagine that I'd gravitate to a book like Bad Medicine by Christopher Wanjek quite readily.

The book purports to contain "Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Distance Healing to Vitamin O," which immediately provoked the "Ooh!" response in me, as I'm also a big fan of skeptics like James Randi, Penn & Teller and the like. But the book itself disappoints in a major way.

The book is divided into seven sections. The first deals with body parts and common misconceptions about them, including the idea that certain areas of the tongue can only sense certain flavors, for instance, or that big brains aren't necessarily better. Sections two and three deal with aging and diseases, respectively. Sure, to some extent this stuff is entertaining, but it doesn't exactly seem to fall within the realm of "debunking myths"--in fact it almost seems common-sensical.

On we go to section four, which deals with diet and food, including a somewhat poorly-reasoned attack on milk as a beverage with little in the way of actual documentation to support the presented claims. Most world cultures can't digest milk, Wanjek reasons, and the actual amount of calcium absorbed by the body from milk is disputed by scientists, and so if we just drink milk for the calcium, why not take a supplement instead? Plus, he writes, we should fear rGBH (recombinant bovine growth hormone), though he doesn't explain why in any depth--he even acknowledges that the one study of rGBH's effects that he was able to locate "doesn't prove anything." His stunning conclusion? "Milk might do your body better than some of the other crap you can drink, but there's no scientific evidence to prove this, and your body probably can't digest it." (Whether "it" means "crap" or "it" means "milk," I'm still not entirely sure.)