Homeophobia
Casual HOMEOPHOBIA I'd been sick for a couple of weeks: sniffle, tickle in my throat, blocked-up ears. I figured I'd been taking the wrong antihistamine. So the other day I walked into a yuppie...
...gelsemium sempervirens...
...I swear he was rubbing his hands...
...He clearly took me for an accomplice now and was oblivious to the other customers in the store...
...Ever heard of homeopathy...
...I liked feeling that help was on its way, that my body had allies that the virus hadn't reckoned on when it came a-knockin...
...Ever tried homeopathy...
...I didn't want to fake the cold out...
...Homeopathic remedies used harmless trace amounts of noxious natural substances, mostly plants, to induce the body's own defenses to kick in...
...It makes your heart race...
...And then I decided that homeopathy didn't make any sense to me, that it defeated the inner logic that had always allowed me to progress through a cold with optimism...
...Here...
...He plopped a box in my hands that said "Oscillococcinum...
...that avoids noxious chemicals and relies on the body's own . . ." Thirty seconds and ten dollars later I was out on the sidewalk with 30 pellets of Coldcalm...
...he said indignantly...
...So the other day I walked into a yuppie drugstore and rang for the pharmacist...
...He handed me an almost-identical box that said "Coldcalm," which was obviously just oscillococ-cinum without the fever medicine...
...Homeopathic medicines rely on the body's own defenses to defeat your cold naturally...
...Naw...
...I've got a sniffle, a tickle in my throat, and blocked-up ears...
...Um . . . oh, look here," I said...
...What a name...
...So I looked to see what was in it...
...It's the fruit of centuries of medical tradition—" (Like leeching, I thought...
...You know the pharmacies hate those things...
...he asked...
...What a pleasant surprise...
...Alas, the following morning my cold was still very much with me and I was all out of pills...
...They're steering people into other stuff where the profit margin is huge...
...I didn't like this, not one bit, but the fellow was, after all, a drug dealer of sorts, and that brought machismo into play...
...It wasn't a pretty sound...
...He himself said, "Oscillococcinum...
...A chubby little guy with a flat-top haircut appeared behind a window...
...I said, "What do you recommend for me...
...He prescribed an antibiotic...
...There was nux vomica, nature's most potent source of strychnine...
...One of these was described as a "deadly nightshade...
...Doesn't make me nervous," I said...
...a battlefield," he spluttered...
...I wasn't going to take Oscillo-coccinum nohow...
...Nonetheless, this looked like real medicine, so I launched into my druidic cure...
...I realized allopathic drugs were one of the pleasures of having colds as an adult—just as huge glasses of ginger ale and peanut-butter-toast-cut-in-four-pieces and schooldays in bed watching "The Three Stooges" had been as a child...
...he asked...
...Very adventurous," I said...
...This turns your body into a...
...They've cut the profit margin on drugs to practically zero...
...The other customers were drifting out the door...
...So he did a bit more scampering, over to a nearby shelf...
...This led me to wonder why my cold itself wasn't inducing the body's defenses to kick in...
...CHMSTOPHER CALDWELL...
...He looked fiercely at me and began to explain that the rotten allopathic medicines, like penicillin and aspirin, relied on foreign bodies to attack germs...
...Any pansy could do that...
...So I went to my doctor...
...It ravages your body," he said...
...I'd take Afrin, Advil, Sudafed, Actifed, whatever...
...Is this from a reputable—" "It's made in France...
...You'd think you'd get a lot of strychnine for ten bucks—at least a lethal dose!—but since the instructions called for 2 tablets every hour, I was going to have to shlep down to the drugstore and get a whole new box...
...How adventurous are you...
...That sounded like what Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy did...
...Coldcalm included belladonna, the aphrodisiac that medieval prostitutes used to dilate their pupils...
...He scampered out from behind his window and leered at me like a bouncer outside a strip-joint...
...This was no placebo but an Elizabethan suicide kit...
...Definitely not," I said...
...If this is similar to Sudafed," I said, "then maybe I'd be better off just getting the—" "Sudafed is shit...
...Sure," he said...
...This, I thought, must be the medicinal equivalent of Celestial Seasonings tea, which, if you say to yourself "It's tea, it's tea, it's tea" often enough, winds up tasting like tea...
...apis mellifica...
...So they're struggling, huh...
...All I wanted was a brand name, but the guy said, "I'll be right with you...
...Granted, there was very little of each of them: only .5 x 1012 mg of belladonna, for instance...
...It makes you nervous...
...I asked if he could charge it to my prescription drug card...
...It reads 'fever, chills, body aches.' And since I don't have fevers or—" "Here...
...In my allopathic hubris, I wanted to defeat this cold, bloody it, rub its face in the dirt, and then taunt it...
Vol. 2 • June 1997 • No. 37
