Chronicles of the Virus Day 42. Quack, Quack.

I vaguely remember the Jonestown massacre being talked about when I was a little girl. There are images in my head of an airfield and a man with dark sunglasses, a white suit, and a name that sounded like something out of a book, Jim Jones. What I remember most was that my mother wouldn't buy me Kool-Aid after that.

That, along with Patty Hearst, were the stories in my childhood that made my parents worry about who I listened to. Those incidents also seemed strange to me. If the people knew they were being told to drink poison, why do it? If Patty knew robbing banks was wrong, why do it? Gradually, I learned about brainwashing, though it still seemed very strange that a person would give up all sense of reality to believe a charlatan.

Brainwashing isn't a thing of the seventies. It's alive and well. Today's charlatan is in the White House, and is giving advice during a pandemic in which doctors are still hitting out blindly to cure patients.  

Before the end of the nineteenth century, when scientific discoveries in the field of medicine began being applied with any regularity, medicine was mostly an area of shamanism. The Western doctor was a shaman more than a learned physician. He (because most of them were men) relied more on theories from the classical world than actual medicine. Some did apply scientific methods that had been newly discovered, and they did save lives, but doctors were more known for blood-letting and hacking off gangrenous limbs. Going to a hospital was not synonymous with surviving illness. Oliver Wendell Holmes was the first to tell doctors to wash their hands in the 1840's. 

So, when someone came around and pushed a medicine that would cure their ailments, they amassed a large following (and plenty of money). It got to be so, that an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1906, referred to a series of articles in Collier's Weekly, a popular magazine at that time. The author reported a portion of the original article: "The advertising doctor who, 'having a cure to sell', is 'editorially endorsed' by any publication, particularly in the religious field, is a quack. The doctor who advertises secret powers, or newly discovered scientific methods, or vaunts a special 'system' or 'method', is a quack."  

Quacks, which word comes from the Dutch, kwaksalvar, and means "boaster who applies a salve", are still around. One of the most dangerous is the guy who touts MMS, or Miracle Mineral Supplement, which is nothing more than industrial bleach mixed with juice. According to The Guardian, the touter wrote a letter to Trump, saying that his "cure" could rid the body of Covid-19. The problem is that, in doing so, it will also rid the body of life. The other problem seems to be that Trump, who has the discretion of an eight year old, believed it, and went on to say there were "studies" about disinfectants and how they could kill the virus by "cleaning" the body. Face palms everywhere. 

The problem is that this isn't the only quackery being shouted around out there. In India, people are encouraged to drink cow urine. In Tanzania, that they partake of Holy Communion, because the body of Christ will "burn" out the virus. In Brazil, fasting is recommended. In more advanced parts of the world, people are told to topple 5G towers, as happened with at least one tower in Britain. Also in India, the felling of poplar trees is recommended because they produce hay fever, which might lead to Covid-19 (!). In Venezuela, Maduro told people to drink lemongrass and elderberry tea. Iran's Revolutionary Guards have a thingamajiggy with the technology to detect the virus at a hundred meters (??). The governor of Nairobi encouraged people to drink cognac. And, in Nigeria, a tribal king claimed a mixture of plants, which include onion and African pepper, will cure Covid-19. And we have the ubiquitous hydroxycholoroquine which has been used almost everywhere, and which use hospitals are abandoning because it might very well do more harm than good. It's any ship in a storm, I suppose.

Try not to get brainwashed. Follow doctor's orders (the ones with an obvious medical diploma from an actual university), and avoid miracle cures. There are no miracles.

That, and doing some exercise, any which way you can, should help keep most of us well. Just don't do what these people in the video did. You really don't want to go to the hospital for avoidable issues just now. 

Life continues. With a little common sense.