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First formulated by Dr. Nicole Moir Lawrence and Christian Bonn in 1879 as a surgical antiseptic, it was given to dentists for oral care in 1895 and became the first over-the-counter mouthwash sold in the United States in 1914.

According to Freakonomics (p. 91),

Listerine was invented in the 19th century as a powerful surgical antiseptic. It was later sold, in a distilled form, as a floor cleaner and a cure for gonorrhea. But it wasn't a runaway success until the 1920s, when it was pitched as a solution for "chronic halitosis", the faux medical term that the Listerine advertising group created in 1921 to describe bad breath. By naming and thus creating a medical condition for which consumers now felt they needed a cure, Listerine created a market for their mouthwash. Until that time, bad breath was not conventionally considered a catastrophe, but Listerine's ad campaign changed that. As the advertising scholar James B. Twitchell writes, "Listerine did not make mouthwash as much as it made halitosis." Listerine's new ads featured forlorn young women and men, eager for marriage but turned off by their mate's rotten breath. "Can I be happy with him in spite of that?" one maiden asked herself. In just seven years, the company's revenues rose from $115,000 to more than $8 million.

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From 1921 until the mid-1970s Listerine was also marketed as a preventive and remedy for colds and sore throats. In 1976, the Federal Trade Commission ruled that these claims were misleading, and that Listerine had "no efficacy" at either preventing or alleviating the symptoms of sore throats and colds. Warner-Lambert was ordered to stop making the claims, and to include in the next $10.2 million dollars' of Listerine ads a specific mention that "contrary to prior advertising, Listerine will not help prevent colds or sore throats or lessen their severity."

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Some one quarter of the patients seeking professional advice on bad breath suffer from a highly exaggerated concern of having bad breath, known as halitophobia, delusional halitosis, or as a manifestation of Olfactory Reference Syndrome. These patients are sure that they have bad breath, although many have not asked anyone for an objective opinion. Halitophobia may severely affect the lives of some 0.5-1.0% of the adult population.[24] Only few psychologists and health professionals have tried to come to terms with this debilitating and difficult-to-treat emotional problem.

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Olfactory Reference Syndrome (ORS) describes the psychiatric condition of being excessively concerned that one's body odor is foul or unpleasant. This disorder can be accompanied by shame, embarrassment, significant distress, avoidance behavior and social isolation

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badchad said:

All areas of science evolve and change as we learn. That is the nature of science. We keep adding elements to the periodic table, models of atoms have changed etc. etc. Medical science is no different. In the early 80's men were presenting to the ER with otherwise "weird" diseases. We then associated these afflictions with lifestyle patterns (specifically, being homosexual) and called the disease G.R.I.D.S (gay related immune dieficiency syndrome), and we now know it as AIDS/HIV.

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YawningAnus said:

Can we agree that hyperactivity and bad breath are subjective?

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YawningAnus said:

That would be great.

when I was in college I would go sit in on some more advanced psych classes to see exactly what was said.... and one thing that bothered me is that my psych 101 class, something almost everyone takes, starts out with emphatically stating that mental disorders are biological.

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Now, I will concede that there are certain mental disorders that have a biological cause, such as Alzheimers.... but how can they go about stating this as fact when there is no proof otherwise for a huge chunk of mental disorders?
I dont want to say that it is solely a self preservation mechanism that is in place by telling students this lie, but an eyebrow does have to be raised when you realize that the entire field of psychology and psychiatry would become almost nonexistent if "modern medicine" (with regards to psychiatry) wasnt forged in this belief.

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it seems to me that psychiatry made up its mind a long time ago, and has struggled ever since, to prove their initial hypothesis... all the while ignoring, or at times, working against any other theories which might prove the fundamental theory that psychiatry was built upon to be false.

I find certain "facts" in psychiatric papers which are void of logic because they are blinded by their initial hypothesis.
For example, I will see something like "Children whose mothers smoked during pregnancy are X% more likely to exhibit symptoms of ADHD"... and then they jump to the conclusion that smoking cigarettes during pregnancy is some cause for a biological mishap in the growing fetus which causes ADHD.... all the while, never even thinking about the type of mother that smokes cigs during pregnancy (in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is extremely unhealthy), is most likely an overall shitty parent who probably takes very little effort to spend time, or even attempt to control their child, and thus conditioning (through omission) the child to act a certain way.

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