What seems right, isn’t

I couldn’t help but think of this verse when I read this Newsweek Health article. Everyone knows that after 5 minutes or so without oxygen you die, because your cells die from oxygen starvation. Because of this, the standard treatment for oxygen deprivation (from heart failure, say) is to rapidly get blood flowing and reoxygenated.

Now comes a study of what really happens to cells that are oxygen starved, and amazingly, cells don’t die after even an hour of lack of oxygen. In fact, it takes several hours for cell death to occur from oxygen deprivation. So why do people die after 5 or 10 minutes without breathing? Because of the treatment of rapidly reintroducing oxygenated blood to the cells. Apparently, the rapid introduction of oxygen triggers something akin to a cell defense mechanism and the cell dies.

How often do we make decisions based on false or inadequate assumptions just because it all seems so logical?