by botherer on Dec.14, 2004, under The Rest
Well, thanks for the waves of sympathy expressed today. I’m overwhelmed by how much better I feel for all the loving words in my time of disease… Oh no, wait, I’m confusing what happened with WHAT DIDN’T HAPPEN EVEN A BIT.
Really, that day one of Science at school wasn’t teaching us about the mystifying mucus-generating abilities of the human body demonstrates a woeful failure of the education system. It simply isn’t possible for my interior to produce such waterfalls of goo at such a tremendous rate, without either my continuous consumption of gallons of water, or my shrivelling up in the manner of your favourite dried fruit. I have done neither.
Unless… unless. Unless my mistake was yesterday, when having a bath. Perhaps that is it – the master-stroke of the evil virus. The desire to have a long, hot bath is not a response to the sickness infesting every cell of my body – it is a SYMPTOM! I was merely feeding it! Lying in that hot water, creating an osmotic potential, I was only doing everything it wanted. The they-turn-out-to-be-very-selectively permeable membranes of the human skin, tissue and sinus tributaries leapt upon this opportunity to restock perhaps as much as eighteen pints of soapy bathwater with which it could generate its Grouchland rainbow of coloured snot.
I shall never bathe again. And showering would seem too much of a risk.
I finish with an open letter to the Evil Pharmaceutical Companies of the world:
Dear the Evil Pharmaceutical Companies of the world,
With the large amounts of money you make from the patenting of vaccines capable of preventing HIV infected mothers from passing the virus onto their unborn children thus preventing the slowing of the spread of this epidemic across the poorest nations in the world, you always claim you fund your research projects, without which you would not be able to “cure cancer” as you so fondly promise. Since your progress in this area is proving somewhat slow, might I encourage you to dedicate a small amount of these profits into creating a placebo cough medicine?
What I require is a thick, gloopy substance, identical in both taste and viscosity to regular cough syrup, but without any of the active contents such as paracetamol. With this, I could then take the recommended dose of delicious, yummy medicinal syrup, and then avoid the almost-all-consuming temptation to chug the rest of the bottle and the ensewing visit to hospital and liver failure, and instead knock back 500ml of the harmless double.
And then, once this project is complete, could you disband and destroy yourselves, thus removing one of the most despicable and evil forces of money and power on the planet.
Love to all,
John Walker
December 14th, 2004 on 21:09
Lori says youre do-lali. Maybe its the cold that makes you that way but I had to tell her youre always that way.
Wouldnt osmosis be great, think of all those people who sit in a bath of beans for comic releif. Now that would be funny
December 14th, 2004 on 21:26
It’s in between the semi-colon key and the hash key.
December 14th, 2004 on 21:30
I still maintain that once you reach 18, doctors should be able to declare you clever enough to know not to down a whole bottle of medicine in one go and let you have that nice banana flavoured stuff again, rather than the ghastly red slop they give you from the age of 5 or so.
December 14th, 2004 on 21:32
In my case, the doctors would be very, very wrong.
December 14th, 2004 on 22:03
It’s okay. They just wouldn’t tell you it’s a placebo.
December 15th, 2004 on 11:54
The trouble with developing treatments when the only people who can afford them /pay for them are vastly outnumbered by those that can’t is that the situation isn’t reconcilable — at least not within the fundamentally capitalist market (and heavily regulated) framework in which these (publically owned) Evil Pharmaceutical companies operate.
The situation you point out is an unhappy symptom of the underlying cause. You essentially have two choices: Fix the problem at source, or route around it, keeping disruption to a minimum. Neither option is without its own problems, of course, but these are a bit beyond the scope of this here wittering.
So, what’s an Evil Pharmaceutical to do?
Overweight? Losing hair? Impotent? Poor memory? Bad body odour? Sweat too much? Unsightly skin?
Treatments for these (and more) are the blockbusters of the future and into which all the smart R&D money is being poured!
After all, there’s no moral complication in body odour! And lets face it, you’d feel cheated if you went to a third-world country and the natives didn’t smell (at least, of death!)
BTW, I’d patent that placebo cough medicine[*] idea if I were you — you never know WHO might be reading!
[*] Although you might have a bit of a problem with “prior art”.
December 15th, 2004 on 13:09
Um, “publically traded”.
Also, I read an interesting story about Cuba, (but can’t remember where, else I’d link) about what they’re doing with regard to drug development.
December 15th, 2004 on 14:19
“Although you might have a bit of a problem with “prior art”
Yeah, just ask any homeopathic medicine ‘expert’. Or the many scientists who have gotten up on stage in a group and staged mass suicide attempts by downing entire bottles of worthless pills to prove that they’re about as medicinal as chewing Fruitella.
December 15th, 2004 on 14:59
Oh, I meant real, off-the-shelf-from-Boots cough syrups with “active ingredients” that don’t erm, actually, you know, act.
Come to remember it though, there is some interesting evidence to suggest that (at least in the case of persistant coughs), a couple of cups of cocoa might be your best bet towards relief from hacking.
(Insert geeky joke here, ho ho).
December 15th, 2004 on 15:03
Ah, here’s a link:
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6699
December 15th, 2004 on 16:14
I do wish you’d pay attention. Beechams All In One has paracetamol. Unless you’ve stumbled upon some research I’ve not discovered, I’m fairly convinced this is reasonably active.
December 15th, 2004 on 17:03
Paracetamol is for aches and pains. You’re talking about a specific cough mixture that happens to have some paracetamol in it. You’re the one getting “mixed up” here.
All I’m suggesting is that you may as well drink cocoa and have a generic paracetamol rather than line the pockets of the laughing directors at despicable EvilPharmaCorp. Chugging back 500ml bottles of the stuff would probably be a calorific mistake anyway, especially by comparison with the Cocoa.
Think of the hugs and puppies kicking your addiction to Beechams would bring. Stick it to the Man. Preferably with excess mucous.
January 1st, 2005 on 12:35
drug companies aren’t all evil. My wonderful daddy darling works in drugs research and right now they’re developing drugs to help with intestinal transplants for people with Crohn’s disease…