Not all on Net is true

Other Voices

IBy Ahmad Al-Sarraf

t is important to warn people from time to time not to pay attention to the streams of news reports and video clips posted in the social media every day, media such as WhatsApp and their negative impact on the majority — the educated, semi-educated, me included.

The increasing materials and cheating, and the great amount of advice, judgments and talks attributed to religious symbols have nothing to do with them, but have become a matter of concern; however the majority tend to believe them.

The situation has become even more worrying with the multiplicity and complexity of the subjects and languages of many of these messages which has a professional touch but intended to damage the minds. It is an endless war of information and intelligence.

One party wants to brighten the image of its faith to you, another tries to shatter your confidence in what you believe and promote the contrary thought, and so on, and a third sells the bad product. The treatment of many diseases, especially the most intractable ones has become the arena of interest for every ignorant person, or a pedantic fraudster.

The Internet has become the domain of every union or cartel promoting medical or food products from eggs, chocolate, coffee, bananas and others through text messages and films showing the extent of their benefits and high nutritional values supported by research and studies attributed to universities and scientific centers, without mentioning the name of any of them.

If names are mentioned, most of them are incorrect, distorted or do not exist, and the promoters say let 10 thousand or a million discover the lie, but there are always double this number who will believe in what they say.

Al-Sarraf

Among these messages, for example, are those which invite everyone to sleep on the right side and cite a religious text to support it, while research shows there is no ideal sleeping position for all, and the sleeping pattern differs from one person to another.

However, men tend to sleep in a certain position, women another and yet again pregnant women have their own style, in addition to an injured person and those with problems of indigestion or back pain, and so on.

Healthy sleep depends not only on the number of hours of the day, but also on the position of sleep, a position which affects the degree of snoring. There are also sleeping positions which cause stomach burn, and others cause the multiplication of facial wrinkles.

Sleeping on the back may be dangerous for some as it leads to blocking breathing if the tongue slips out of its place due to gravity at the bottom of the throat, closing the airway passage and causing suffocation, which sometimes leads to death. Therefore, those who have such symptoms or fear are advised to sleep on their side.

Doctors advise the pregnant women to sleep on the left side because it improves the blood circulation of the mother and the baby. It also reduces burps for those who suffer from it, but on the other hand it puts pressure on the stomach and lungs, and perhaps the numbness in the arm especially when placed under the head.

Sleeping on the stomach, although it helps to stop snoring and prevents the risk of losing breath, is not recommended for many.

We repeat and repeat again the need to be cautious and not to believe everything that is posted on the Internet, fraudsters are everywhere and it has become very easy with the development of the art of Photoshop, which makes it possible to see an important person delivering a speech in an entire forged video clip, fake voice, image and content.

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