Is Drinking Water Really Bad Medicine?

Good grief! Saying that the news is telling people not to drink water seems like an overreaction to today’s “news” that drinking 8 glasses of water a day “is of little benefit,” but there it is on Reuters:

There is no clearcut scientific rationale for the average healthy individual to drink a lot of water—and it may be downright harmful—according to two kidney experts. (Emphasis mine.)

Why has this become a news item? There is no new evidence to counter the idea that drinking 6 - 8 glasses of water per day is a good idea. Some researchers simply reviewed existing studies and did not find that this recommendation was “evidence based,” which means there aren’t randomized double blind clinical trials to support the recommendation. I guess the bottled water industry has not been devoting enough of their budget to R&D. So now what? We don’t need to drink much water unless some scientists confirm it’s a good idea.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t advocate believing everything you hear and I don’t oppose looking into claims with scientific research. But along comes junk science like this and we get headlines such as, “Busting The 8-Glasses-A-Day Myth” and “Research debunks health value of guzzling water.”  Even the better news sources just seem to add a question mark or “scientists say” to the end of the same junk headline.

Only FoxNews actually went so far as to say, “Skip the Water, Have a Soda Instead,” but that’s the implication of this story—we can drink this other stuff and it will be just as good. But this so-called study that was somehow considered newsworthy had absolutely nothing to do with that.

Apart from the problem with how science and health issues are covered by the media, there is a deeper issue which is related to the topic I’ve been writing about: how do we define health? It’s a question that needs to be answered before we can talk about health care in a meaningful way. If the answer is simply, “The lack of symptoms,” then the only kinds of health care we need are interventions and sometimes getting rid of things in the environment shown to cause problems —the top two items in my four-leveled breakdown of types of healing. And this is the kind of health care we have for the most part.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to talk about these different levels of health care because I can see that a lot of misunderstanding and bad advice comes from confusing the levels. In other words, this study looked at water as a medicine, as something to relieve symptoms, not as a component of health. The headlines talk about busting the myth, but what the study is actually saying is, “There is no evidence that drinking 8 glasses of water per day is effective medical treatment for the few types of symptoms that have been studied so far.”

Thinking about health care at different levels means you ask different questions. For example, if you are wondering if drinking enough water is important to health, then the question becomes what happens when you don’t get enough—over both the short and the very long term. But if you are thinking in the medical model then you ask the question of whether increasing water intake will help alleviate some symptoms. It’s a fair question, but the when we make general health claims based on intervention-minded thinking, we end up with the absurd articles found in the health section of today’s news.