I love advertising from the golden age and earlier, especially quack medical advertisements, like the bottle of Bayer’s Heroin meant to calm your nerves. I find them cute and stunning at the same time, so number 5 on Cracked Magazine’s The Five Most Insane Original Uses of Famous Products was just about perfect for me. Too lazy to click the link? Well, that’s okay, I’ll just tell you that the original use for Lysol was as a feminine hygiene product.

Yeah. For serious. Now you want to click that link, don’t you? I’ve used Lysol, and I have to say that the last possible use I would imagine for it would be cleaning out a vagina. Douche with a zing? No thanks.

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It is entirely sad to read stories like this. A 35 year old woman from Quebec has died after a detox program. According to the article, ten women were “wrapped in plastic with mud, and also with blankets.” The idea was that they could sweat out all those nasty toxins from their system. So how did this happen?

Well, the most obvious answer is that ignorant people are dangerous. The people who performed this so-called cleanse no doubt had the best of intentions and legitimately wanted to help their fellow man, but their lack of understanding of the dangers they  were exposing people to is obvious. People in the area, at least according to the article, have heard screaming and carrying on from the farmhouse before. I have to assume that the woo-flingers inside thought they were doing a helpful but uncomfortable service to their customers. But they weren’t.

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We often hear from the alt med community that how an intervention works is less important than the fact that it works. If a person isn’t well and you do something to them to make them feel better, isn’t that good enough? Any scientific mind would say that is foolish, but those are the scientists. The majority in our modern world are not nearly so skeptical. I remember an awkward conversation with a friend who had diabetes, and a particular treatment he had been using was being banned for it having serious safety concerns and no actual basis for benefit, yet he swore by it. He insisted to me that it was the fault of the drug companies for not wanting to test his treatment due to it being cheap and readily available, not something that a big drug company could patent and rule the world with.

I understood his frustration, but he was making a serious mistake. If this remedy worked reliably, then it should stand up to scrutiny. But the system is there to protect consumers from those who would take advantage of them. Quite frankly, I explained that I hated the idea that he was taking what appeared to be a dangerous and ultimately unknown treatment for a very serious disease. He used the “I don’t care how it works, it just does!” line on me, and I said that wasn’t enough. He didn’t like that.

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You know how everything about you is just wrong, right? Because there is some perfect common vision of what a person should be like, and you don’t match it. So naturally, what you should do is evaluate every way in which you stray from being perfect and find some way to change each and every thing about you until what you are is an amorphous example of average. Are you too moody? Time for some antidepressants, even if we really haven’t figured out what they are doing and why they are doing it. Tits too small? Silicone it up! (as an aside, one of the most common ways people find this site is by searching for silicone butt injections) We have a society right now that craves homogeneous citizens even as it natters on incessantly at its diversity talking points.

Actually, it’s funny enough to think about it, but at least with regards to facial recognition, this is actually how our brains function. We don’t store all that there is to store in a face because that would be wasteful, so we store what deviates from our own perceived norm, which allows us to hold a lot more faces in our mind’s eye. But I digress.

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