These hadiths are often presented as a simple scientific knockout against Islam. The stronger answer is that they are real reports that deserve careful reading, but they do not do the work critics want them to do.
Why the objection feels serious
The argument is not silly. The reports are found in the most respected hadith collections, and they sound, at first hearing, like pre-modern folk science: dip a fly into a drink, drink camel urine as medicine, and believe the first human was sixty cubits tall. A critic says: if these are false, then either the Prophet (PBUH) taught falsehood or the hadith system preserved falsehood as religion.
"If a fly falls in the drink of one of you, let him immerse it, then remove it, for in one of its wings is disease and in the other is healing."
Sahih al-Bukhari 3320
The Prophet (PBUH) permitted some sick men to drink from the milk and urine of the camels.
Sahih al-Bukhari 5686
"Allah created Adam, and his height was sixty cubits."
Sahih al-Bukhari 3326
What these reports actually establish
The fly hadith does not say flies are clean, or that people must drink filth, or that every fly in every circumstance is harmless. It gives a practical ruling for a common situation in a world without modern sanitation: if a fly falls into a drink, the drink is not automatically lost. The wording mentions disease and healing. Some modern studies have explored antimicrobial agents associated with flies, but Muslims should not overstate this as if the hadith has been "proved in the lab." The point is narrower: the report is not obviously absurd just because flies can carry pathogens.
The camel urine report is even more often misquoted. It is not a general command to Muslims to drink urine. It concerns a small group who became ill in Madinah, were sent to the camels, and drank their milk and urine as a treatment known in that environment. Jurists discussed this under medicine, necessity, and the purity or impurity of the urine of edible animals. No serious scholar took it as a devotional practice or a license to consume unsafe substances. If a treatment is harmful in a given time and place, Islamic law does not ask people to harm themselves.
The harder case: Adam's height
The report about Adam is not a medical prescription or an everyday observation. It belongs to reports about the beginning of human creation and Paradise. The hadith also says the people of Paradise will enter upon the form of Adam. Critics read it as a direct claim that archaeology should find 90-foot human skeletons. That is an assumption, not a necessary reading. We have not excavated "Adam," nor does the absence of such remains disprove a report about the first human created by God.
That said, Muslims should speak plainly: if someone begins with the rule that only what current physical anthropology can accommodate may be accepted, then this hadith will be rejected. Islam does not begin with that rule. It allows revelation to inform us about matters beyond ordinary reconstruction, while still using reason and evidence within their proper limits.
What this does not prove
These narrations do not prove that Bukhari and Muslim are unreliable as collections. Hadith authentication is not based on whether a modern reader finds a text intuitive; it studies transmission, narrator reliability, corroboration, wording, and scholarly reception. Nor does one difficult report collapse the Quran, the Prophethood of Muhammad (PBUH), prayer, law, or the whole hadith tradition.
At the same time, these reports do not prove that Muslims should turn hadith into a modern science textbook. The Sunnah guides belief, worship, ethics, law, and prophetic wisdom. Some reports touch medicine and creation, but they must be read with language, context, juristic method, and humility.
So the honest answer is this: these hadiths raise fair questions, but they are not demonstrable falsehoods in the simple way critics claim. They call for disciplined interpretation, not panic and not exaggeration.