Anyone who comes here, perhaps as many as tens of people know that I’ve got this chronic pain thing going on.
After about 30 days of it you are ready to try a good deal many things. It’s been 4-1/2 years and that hasn’t changed one bit. I’d scoff goat glands or snort battery acid if there was proof that it helped.
So in the pain-clinic circles someone suggested that diet may play a part and that by adjusting one’s diet one might, and I stress might see some positive changes in that area.
Being heavy into the cycle of ready-to-try-something-anything, I agreed to see this nutritional doctor that was suggested by the someone I made mention of in the last paragraph.
The place was a bear to find so I was late. That was the last good thing about this visit.
I shuffled in and they gave me the obligatory sheaf of dead trees to fill out all my intimate thoughts, visceral feelings, embarrassing bodily functions, and most importantly, credit card and billing info.
I was then ushered into a room where a gal who we will call Barbarella put on this band thingy around my chest that measured my Zetans or some such thing while lying down and standing up. Big snoozer there. Then I went to another room and filled out more paperwork. I was only on page 47 of 63 when in walks Doctor Seuss.
We talked about what I want and it boiled down to (1) less pain, (2) some weight loss, and (3) lower cholesterol. I don’t need help with sunken arches, atrophied trenchfoot, spontaneous extra appendix bursting and regrowth (Vestigal Jesus Organs, or VJO), migrating toenails, cleft kneecaps, excessive ear fat, West Ebola-Listerial Nigerian Nile-Pox, or any other crap up to and including failed penile implants or a hyperspatially-deviated septum.
He asked all the questions I already answered. I got all specific on his ass and said that my neck is FUBAR’ed, but specifically C4-5 and C5-6 are the problems on the left leading to lots of scary conditions ending in “-algia”.
I was told to hold out my right arm to the side. He pushed down on it. He pulled, prodded, had me do other things with the left while doing things to that right arm.
So far, so good, muscle strength test – seemed pretty straightforward.
Each time he was pushing down on my arm with one of two levels of force. Light pushes where he lifted his body as if he was pushing down hard and then actually pushing down hard during those times when he would say “See how it was weaker, there?”
Beep beep, back the truck up. My right arm is my good one. No numbness or weakness there at all. And the feeling is perfectly fine there. So where I visually saw two levels of effort in his pushing downward on my arm, I correspondingly felt two levels of force. It wasn’t that I was any weaker from one to the next, it was just more downward force.
But I said to myself, “Ok, go with it, because, after all, he can’t possibly be doing this this badly. No one can.”
He continued on for some time putting my left arm in different positions and having me do different things and then pushing down on my right – each time with this exaggerated forcing that looks like it came from Pro Wrestling or my five year old.
He then stopped and said “How are you feeling?”
I said “Well, I’ve had my right arm out there for some time, it’s getting a bit tired.”
So he motioned to the aide Barbarella who materialized next to me, and I jumped to the side and screamed “SNEAK MUCH???” in hushed tones at the top of my lungs. She had come in while I was unawares and distracted.
He said in a kind and thoughtful voice “Well, you’re going to have more difficulty with your left so Barbarella will help us out.”
Huh? Barbarella will help us out? What is this, a porno set?
Then things got really really strange…
Barbarella put her right hand on my left shoulder, held out her left arm to the side. Then Doctor Seuss started putting things in my right hand, arm straight out to the side, and pushing down on HER arm.
Did you get that? I was stunned. Stunned, I tell you.
He put a sealed-on-both-ends vial in my right hand and pushed down on her arm. He started swapping it out for other glass bottles with screw-on lids – one contained thousands of little eyeballs (or tapioca), another looked like dried ginger (or mummified fingers), and one that looked like sputum. Then came the odd ones – plutonium peanut butter, whirled peas, cat fur, back carseat vacuumings, rutabaga scrotums, transient toenails (too awful to describe), toad lickings (scraped from Wall Street yuppie tongues), purple piss, and scented snake oil… plus 30 more. Sometimes her arm would go down more, sometimes less.
At the end of all that I was sitting there thinking “Ok, this cannot actually be happening. Can’t be…”
You’d be proud of me to know that I did not go “House” on him and mentally bitch-slap him while simultaneously shaming him hideously.
But I did bitch-slap him and I did shame him but just not simultaneously. I just didn’t do it cruelly and on purpose like I would a co-worker or someone I don’t respect. Just on purpose. I was in control, sans cruelty.
Yes, ID10T-Killer reads this blog from time to time so he can support the notion regarding me shaming people I don’t respect, as can The Dude.
I said “Ok, you’re going to have to bear with me because I thought I was here for a dietary lifestyle consult, and I cannot for the life of me see how you can possibly get a viable diagnostic indicator from (1) having me hold glass containers of different things, and (2) pushing down on another person’s arm acting as proxy for mine.”
They looked at me in stunned silence and I said “There’s no way a material in a glass bottle is going to affect me physically in a way that is a useful diagnostic.” (Barring hard radiation or a leaky bottle of HF, of course.)
He looked at me and said… he said… he… he…
Look, Loyal Reader… I can’t make this stuff up. It’s too bizarre. I’m perfectly serious. He said:
The stuff in the vials acts on your body via Quantum Mechanics. – Dr. Seuss in response to Lemur King’s disbelief of utter horseshit new-age beliefs
I looked at him and said “You do realize that my education/degree is in the field of physics?”
Barbarella just stared at me with her mouth open, shocked that someone would disagree with a man of his learning and caliber. Dr. Seuss said with a learned air of superiority, hoping to cow me, “Have you ever taken a course in quantum mechanics?”
I chuckled and said “Yes, I’m a research and opto-mechanical engineer and I’ve done quite a lot of physics, classical and dabbled in the quantum as well. And, you should know that QM is not applied at the macro-scale.”
Note to readers: Can we please not get into the argument that classical mechanics are derived directly from quantum mechanics? If you are going to argue for QM being applied to the macro scale show me something huge that can tunnel through a brick wall – in the QM sense – and I don’t want to hear about the BBW Wal-Mart Hippo-in-Spandex stampeding after the smell of a roasted chicken. I’m just not up for it. The point here is that I was calling out a guy for being full of shit in my presence (and on my dime, you could argue). And you are encouraged to give me demerits for not asking him if he’d ever read Feynman’s lectures, as I have, and if he has, asking him “Did you like the ‘Thirteen Easy Pieces’ lectures or the ‘Seven Extremely Hard Topics’ ones better?” That would have been the perfect test because if he said he had and not corrected me by saying “‘Six Easy Pieces,’ you mean, right?” or “Don’t you mean ‘Six Not-So-Easy Pieces’?” he would have failed the test. It would have been great because then I would have been completely justified in turning him into an intellectual quadriplegic for trying to bullshit me using my hero, Richard Feynman. Sort of like providing for him a quantum well to fall down.
“Do you have any scientific papers describing the physical/physiological mechanisms you are talking about?” I asked.
Dr. Seuss turned a bit red and said “No, but the handout I gave you tells you everything you need to know about it.”
I glanced at the two pages, front and back, and said “I don’t see any references here. This could be from anywhere! Ok, look, before I go spending my money on visits and lots of supplements I want to re-evaluate whether I want to be coming here. I’m having a hard time buying any of this.”
He got excited and said, “Ok, so you may not believe in this, but you have to focus on results. I could have come in here wearing a Dr. Seuss† hat and you would have thought ‘Gee, he’s really weird’ but you would have to pay attention to the results, and I can do what you want and reduce pain so you can get off painkillers like you asked.”
† Thus the name I have given him: “Dr. Seuss”
Note: I would love it if he could actually do all that, because I wouldn’t have been there otherwise, but the moment a rocket scientist starts telling me that he has little faerie-friends that assist him in sexually gratifying his cat every night is the moment I decide to never ride on his rocket. Same thing goes for the medical profession. If my surgeon carries a lucky rabbit’s foot or my dietician guy believes that bottles of stuff act on my body quantum dynamically, I’m out of there.
“Are we through here? Because I’m done. I’ll let you know what I decide.”
So I paid the charge because dissatisfaction with methods isn’t the same as being overtly ripped off – I did agree to the “consultation” even if it was a bunch of Ann Arbor new-age bullshit and walked out of there, feeling rather like a chump and wishing I had wasted the money on cheap booze and trashy women instead because that would have been an orders-of-magnitude better use of my time and money.
Yes, Cruel Wife reads this blog, too, and I’m not so sure she wouldn’t also have preferred I put the money to better uses, like cheap booze and trashy women.
Now, if he had talked to me about magnets, crystals, or colored water derived from illuminating it under filtered light, that would have been different. We could have talked then. We could have had a chat.
What pisses me off is that there are people that are buying into that – belief in fakery in spite of clear evidence of fraud right in front of their very eyes.
If you have your own story of how your personal Dr. Seuss has helped you and improved your life using the methods described above, I’d like you to write it all down, capture every detail, and comment about it anywhere but here. I’m not interested.
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Lemur King's Folly 