Dr. Bonkers Egyptian Oil and Other Quackery
Read Time:1 Minute, 29 Second
by Glenn R. Geist
BS, that’s what’s on my mind and I’m not talking about Fox News or politics, or at least not directly. I stumbled onto a FB page that’s dedicated to feeding health and “wellness” paranoids the organic crap they use to fertilize their passionate ignorance. Did you know your electric meter can kill your fruit trees? Of course, you didn’t because it’s nonsense but they have the “proof” even if it proves nothing but public gullibility.
It’s called “Natural Cures Not Medicine” – and medicine it’s not. This morning’s lead is that 85 Holistic doctors have died recently – and isn’t that suspicious? Not really in the absence of any further information. Whatever calculus they’re using to determine the slope of the graph of deaths over time, the figure means nothing unless you see that graph. It doesn’t indicate a trend and as always regression to the mean obliterates such dishonest assumptions.
But there’s always an anecdote, there’s always a “study” that shows something meaningless and so the placebo effect always substantiates the claim and really all you need is one claim that hooks the gullible. It’s been going on forever, of course, but it’s big business today – selling the Zitwog-free lifestyle and miracle beans that cure Alzheimer’s within a week.
We’re a nation of superstitious and tenacious believers, we are not much better than my great grandparent’s generation with their “cupping” and electric shock therapy for Neurasthenia, that disease invented for the purpose of being cured by quack medicine. Doctor Bonkers made money from his Egyptian Oil and you’ll still buy “organic” food in the total absence of any evidence that it does you any good. “The wheels of commerce are greased with bullshit” my dad used to say. And he was right.
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Turns out that playing in the dirt helps your immune system develop. Maybe it even helps your body get rid of warts.
Aw, come on folks. How is a dishonest con man suppose to make a living. I grew for a shot period of time around my very old great grandmother who always had some weird cure for everything. As I think about it now there was one of those things that she had that did not then, and still does not make any sense whatsoever. Like a lot of kids, I guess, I played in a lot of dirt. I mean, to the point that when I was about four years old I would crawl under my grandmother’s house and literally grab a handful of good black soil and just eat it. Yeah, it’s a wonder that live to tell about it. At the same time, and a probable correlation here, I used to get warts on my hands. Now, it is pretty well settled science that warts are cause by a virus of some sort but that was unknown in my strange family. Granny used to tell me to get a dishcloth that used to was the dishes, rinse it off real well, rub it vigorously over the warts, and then go bury it in the backyard. Dumb and stupid I admit, but the really strange part was that it worked. Granny said it only work for children because their skin was not as tough to penetrate. Now that does not make up for nearly all of the weird things she has us do for other ailments but that one worked. I asked a friend who was a doctor about that and he said that because the dish soap used back was probably more caustic than what used today and was actually strong enough to killed te virus.
Same thing with women being diagnosed with hysteria and we all know the made up cure for that, some doc flicking the bean for a woman to cure her of her madness. I am a vegan that does believe in some natural cures but I’m not going to eat kidney beans when I need antibiotics for a bladder infection. Some people take it way too far to the extreme.
I’ve long wondered about that term “natural.” Historically all kinds of serious poisons have been sold as and in fact actually are natural. But not to get too far into amateur philosophy, isn’t “everything” by definition natural if it exists? Supernatural cures are unlikely to work, but they still have adherents galore. I prefer to refer to scientific method which has a much better record.
The underlying premise is that anything produced with a knowledge of chemistry isn’t as good as something you find on the ground, has no merit. H2O or dihydrogen oxide is not as healthy therefore as pond water and is best if it’s imported and expensive even if it comes from a municipal water plant in some other town.
Of course you can get away with anything if you call it “artisanal” Producing artisanal goods is big business.
The root of it all is fear of modernity and technology. Someone coined “misoneism” for the fear of innovation and I suppose most of us are guilty of it, but everything from the lightening rod to the locomotive has inspired terror and of course a miracle cure.