Q: Can swearing relieve pain?

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A: You hit your thumb with a hammer. It hurts. But chances are it will hurt less if you immediately yell a swearword. That’s what a team of British researchers recently discovered when they asked 67 college students to submerge their hands in icy water for as long as they could stand the pain. Half were told to repeat their favorite swearword. The other half repeated a neutral word describing a table, such as “brown” or “solid.”

The result: Students who swore -- most used words beginning with “f” or “s” -- reported significantly less pain. They were also able to keep their hands in the ice water longer -- an average of 190 seconds, compared to 140 seconds for those who used neutral terms.

Why would swearing reduce pain? One possibility is it serves to distract you. In addition, “increased pain tolerance is associated with [strong] emotional reactions,” says study co-author Richard Stephens, a professor of psychology at Keele University in England. For example, a hard slap on the back hurts. But when you feel elated because your team just won a big game, you hardly notice such a blow.  

Q: Are prostate cancer screening tests really necessary?

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A: No one knows for sure. While experts used to recommend prostate cancer screening using the blood test for prostate-specific antigen (PSA), no national medical organization currently encourages routine PSA screening. Instead, the American Cancer Society suggests that doctors “offer” the test annually and let men, starting at age 50, decide for themselves if they want it. The American Urological Association concurs, adding that African-American men or men with a family history of the disease should be offered the option at age 45.

Why the ambiguity? When Dartmouth researchers recently analyzed prostate cancer diagnoses and treatments after 1986 (the year the PSA test was introduced), they found that diagnoses and treatments rose by more than one million but deaths declined only slightly. And when National Cancer Institute researchers compared death rates from prostate cancer in 76,000 men, they found no significant difference between men who had had annual PSA tests and those who had not.

The truth is that “the cancer-predictive value of PSA testing is about 30 percent,” says Jason Wilbur, a clinical assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Iowa. “This means that fewer than one man in three with a high PSA actually has cancer.”

What’s more, when a high PSA does lead to a bona fide cancer diagnosis, doctors can’t tell if the tumor is potentially life threatening or indolent (meaning, very slow growing and not life threatening). “With PSA screening, you find a lot of indolent tumors that would never bother men at all,” says Dr. Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health.

H. Gilbert Welch, professor of medicine and the lead author of the Dartmouth study, agrees. “For every man who avoids a prostate cancer death due to PSA screening, about 50 men have to be treated unnecessarily,” he says. So the question is, will you be the one man whose life is saved by PSA screening or one of the 50 men who end up undergoing unnecessary treatment? Not only does over-treatment waste health care dollars, but one-third of patients will develop serious problems as a result of treatment, including urinary and fecal incontinence as well as erectile dysfunction.

“What we need is a better screening test,” says Mark Harris, a professor at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Until then, talk to your doctor, discuss the pros and cons, then make the decision together.

Q: How can I tell if my kids’ backpacks are too heavy?

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A: If you’ve been watching your youngsters head to school burdened by heavy backpacks, you’ve probably wondered if they’re doing their bodies harm. One way to find out is to weigh your kids, then weigh their fully loaded packs. Ideally, a backpack should weigh no more than 10 percent of a child’s body weight, according to studies conducted in France and at Pennsylvania State University. When a backpack weighs more than 15 to 20 percent of body weight, the child is at significant risk for back, shoulder and neck pain, say researchers.

You can further encourage healthy backpack practices by teaching kids to load backpacks so that the heaviest items sit closest to their back, distribute the load evenly between the shoulders and adjust shoulder straps so the pack fits snugly against the back.

Finally, if your children regularly carry overloaded backpacks, consider getting a rolling pack that can be pulled instead of carried. Or lighten the load by obtaining two sets of textbooks -- one to keep at school and the other at home so your kids don’t have to lug them back and forth every day. 

This Live Right Live Well Expert Q&A was written by journalist Michael Castleman.