Category Archives: The Lone Psychiatrist

Accidental Posting.  This is the post for tomorrow I was working on when I hit the wrong button.  It’s still the post for tomorrow.

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

I suppose there are a lot of good reasons to be tolerant of the superstitions people hold, but it’s not always easy to put up with it. 

For instance, a lot of people are so superstitious about this and that, they don’t help bring up Old Sol mornings.  That naturally puts a heavier load on the rest of us.  Not being sure someone else is going to cover it requires iron nerves if we decide to sleep in, or happen to croak during the night.

Last time I flew anywhere the airport security folks were so superstitious one of them wanted to physically touch what’s in my  medicine bag.  Can you imagine that?

I’ve been wracking my brain trying to remember when that was.  I don’t think I’ve been through airport security since sometime before 1998, but I think I must have been later than that by several years.  It’s only since people got superstitious about other people of Middle Eastern extraction, I think, that anyone’s gotten that submerged in his fantasies he’d do something quite that far off-the-wall.

But it shows up other places, maybe worse.  For instance, I’ve got this stuff made from red clover, bloodroot, galangal, and sheep sorrel I use on myself to get rid of skin cancers popping up from time to time because of my not protecting myself against a particular insecticide when I was a young man.  The easy way was to buy it because making it is a considerable chore.  

But a few years ago the FDA got all uppidy and superstitious about it.  Went out and attacked the bejesus out of all the websites where a person can buy it, ran them off.  Even the name is verboten.

Then a few days ago Gale was telling me about some stuff his dermatologist was having him rub on his face to get rid of skin cancers.  That is one horrifying face old Gale’s putting on at the moment, same as you’d expect if he was using the same stuff I’m using, but doing it on his face.

It appears to me what Gale’s putting on his face is the exact same concoction the FDA was so superstitious about people using if they were buying it off the web, or making it themselves.    Maybe it was the fact every Native American tribe on the continent’s been making it and treating themselves with it for all manner of carcinomas since before Columbus.

That ought to be enough to make anyone makes a living off treating people for cancer, or selling pharmaceuticals to them for big bucks superstitious.  It goes against every superstition the medical and scientific communities hold dear.

I suppose a person just needs to be especially conscious and tolerant of scientific and medical superstitions, more than others.  After all, they’ve got an army of police and other people carrying around guns willing to use them if anyone violates their superstitions.

The Tale of the Dreamsheep Mother and the Y2K War Gods

Sometimes I think the whole reason people have those superstitions is just to give them an excuse.  An excuse to explain how their particular brand of enlightenment is the only one anyone has any business adopting as a superstition.

Because it’s the one they believe.

Old Jules