When the truth itches, it's false

Pam Burke

Our bodies — and stop me if you've heard this one — replace all of their cells every seven years. You've heard that one, right? Yeah, me too.

It's not true.

Some parts of our bodies never replace cells, like our brains and eye lenses, says Dr. Jonas Frisén of Sweden. What we get at birth is what we're stuck with, and it's all getting older every second.

Pam Burke

On the other hand, the lining of the small intestine replaces itself about once a week, says QueeLim Ch'ng of King's College London, and the skin and liver only replace cells when damage occurs. The skin, which is working to maintain a specific thickness, actually sheds cells we can see with the naked eye (unless your eye lenses are worn out) and brush it off our dark clothes.

Frisén is attempting to track down the origin of that seven-year cell-replacement myth, and I thought it might tell him that it's related to the phrase "seven-year itch" — the age-old wisdom, popularized in the Marilyn Monroe movie of that name, which says that after seven years of marriage men and women are more likely to cheat. It's like a metaphor.

I, of course, was assuming that "seven-year itch" was based on time-tested anecdotal evidence from eons of human attempts at monogamous relationships. The metaphor being that people shed their old life, or old self, like cells and move on with the new. I even know someone who did cheat every seven years when she was married and, after that behavior soured her husband on continuing their marital association, she went on to reinvent the rest of her life with job-changing, relocation and schooling. Every seven years.

But it turns out that the "seven-year itch" concept is just a bunch of bunk altogether, too.

A quick Internet search makes it obvious that roughly 1.3 gajillion studies have been conducted on the topic of marital restlessness with results as varied as a two-year itch to a 10-years-and-11-months itch (which apparently can NOT be rounded up to 11 years or you will be surprised as heck-figh to find your soul mate in a compromising position one month earlier than you expected).

In fact, the phrase was highjacked — incorrectly.

George Axelrod, who wrote "The Seven Year Itch" Broadway play that the movie was based on, kind of pulled that saying right out of his ascot in 1952. Worse than that, really, he'd originally planned to write about a 10-year itch, but he'd heard the "seven-year itch" phrase in another — medically related — usage and liked how it sounded better.

So for the record, you should know that the phrase "seven-year itch" was used for centuries as a common reference to an embarrassing and irritating skin condition that didn't occur after seven years, it just seemed to occur for seven years. (Not that people had to itch for seven years; that phrase just rolled off the tongue better than six-years-and-11-months itch.)

The condition? Scabies. S.c.a.b.i.e.s!

Yes, the "seven-year itch" is an itchy, scaly, rash-like condition caused by a mite that burrows into your skin.

It was also called camp itch, army itch and French itch. It is thought to be referred to in the third book of Moses in the Bible. And in the fourth century B.C., says R.A. Roncalli, Aristotle supposedly was writing about scabies in a report describing "lice" that "escape from little pimples if they are pricked." So people have been itching over this issue for a while now.

What, then, are we to make of all this information?

When I imagined this column, I thought I would make some correlation between the seven-year cell renewal and the seven-year sex-life renewal and wrap it all up with some deeply philosophical concept — because you know I'm all about the deep end of the smarts pool.

Then my research actually revealed that we walk around spouting a lot of nonsense as if it's proven fact.

So all we can really get out of this experience is disappointment and a loss of faith in the ability of humans, such as myself, not to be blah-blah-blah spewing misinformers.

That and the deep-rooted urge to go take a shower.

(But don't just take my word for it at http://viewnorth40.wordpress.com.)