View Illness to Stay Well

In slang vernacular, saying something is "bad" actually means that it's really, really good. In a similar mind-flipping reversal, though your natural instinct may be to "see no illness, hear no illness," it turns out that in order to stay healthy, it may be advisable to look at sick people…on occasion.

Researchers from the University of British Columbia came to this conclusion after showing volunteers a series of 10-minute slide shows on two different days. On the first day, the volunteers viewed slides of furniture, and not surprisingly, nothing much happened. On a subsequent day, they were shown slides of sick people manifesting various forms of illness and decrepitude -- including graphic shots of pox and oozing skin lesions, mucous running out of noses, and so on. Or, they watched slides of guns pointed directly at them. >