The slow and steady researchers

As always, the much-praised researchers come out with research that is woefully outdated by the time they reach the layman. Experience is sometimes defined as the comb that nature confers on a person when he gets bald. The same, or its approximate equivalent, can be said about the researchers.

The most fanciful scoop came a few years ago from the United States. Researchers came up with the earth-shaking finding that tightly-knotted neckties can actually increase the risk of the deadly eye disease, glaucoma. A double-windsor knot, according to the finding, can constrict the jugular vein and put ‘unhealthy pressure’ on the eyeball.



All this while, when hundreds of thousands of smart men around the globe were busy, each in front of his respective mirror trying to get the double-windsor knot just right, little did they realise that with each little tug they were actually increasing the pressure on their jugular veins and, consequently, putting their eyeballs under strain.

Scientists at the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology, tested the internal optic blood pressure of 20 healthy men and an equal number suffering from glaucoma. The participants were tested when they were wearing an open shirt collar and then three minutes after loosening their ties. They reportedly found that 60pc of the men with glaucoma and 70pc of the healthy ones experienced an increase in internal eye blood pressure after wearing the tie for just three minutes. So much for sartorial elegance!



Be that as it may, we are left wondering who, or what, brought neckties into fashion in the first place. Life must have been so much more comfortable and, keeping in view the research, a lot healthier before the infernal things came into existence. To think about it, the suited gentlemen we saw on Western television period dramas did look a wee bit beady-eyed. Now we know why!

Another group of researchers came up with the revolutionary conclusion that quitting smoking for as little as four weeks could dramatically reduce the odds of wound infection after surgery. A team of doctors from the University Hospital in Copenhagen, Bispebjerg, had studied the healing of small incisions in some 78 volunteers to reach this interesting conclusion.

The question, however, remains as to what use this finding would be put to, after the learned researchers had gone to all this trouble of arriving at it. Obviously, smokers would be well advised to give up on their habit a certain number of weeks before undergoing surgery. But emergency surgery can hardly be anticipated. It represents one notch up for non-smokers, though.



Back to the subject of the good old necktie, people who abhor the use of it must be at peace. But some, like our good neighbours, the Iranians, do it for religious and/or cultural reasons. Several other nations, particularly those who live in areas with a comparatively hotter climate, prefer an open collar. Even then the proverbial ‘upper class’ still manages to wear the offending piece of apparel in question, possibly under the cultural influence of their erstwhile colonial masters.

All in all, the anti-necktie revolution would hardly be welcome news for the necktie manufacturers, nor indeed for those fashion buffs that pride themselves on their enviable collections of neckties. Such habits tend to die hard. Perhaps, it might well spawn a new fad of a collection of necktie-less apparel or worse a ‘loose-tie’ craze. Either way, the loser, as always, would be the sane crowd.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 1^st, 2017.

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