The Price You Pay…
Say what you want about Twitter, but it’s democratic. It might be a hateful cesspool of phobias and prejudices populated largely by trolls and Russian spambots, but it does at least give you a fighting chance of telling the Pope to go fuck himself. That’s the sort of progress humanity needs, if you ask me.
In the spirit of this connection — the connection between me and people who can go fuck themselves — I got whiskey drunk the other night and called a Twitter-based herbal medicine practitioner a cunt.
It started amiably enough, with me going about my life unaware of the existence of a snake oil peddler by the name of Djehuty Ma’at-Ra, but then he cropped up in my feed talking about how, if the schools force you to vaccinate your child, you can undo the “damage” by feeding said child activated charcoal.
As several people pointed out, eating charcoal will not make much difference to anything that’s been injected directly into your blood stream, so we can already infer a fair bit about Mr. Ma’at-Ra’s medical qualifications. Still, ornery and fascinated by coming across one of these fuckwits in the wild, I went down something of a rabbit hole.
Djehuty Ma’at-Ra contends that childhood illnesses don’t kill children. When someone pointed out that they really, straight-up, no-foolin’ DO, Ma’at-Ra countered that the data on child mortality comes from people with a vested financial interest in vaccines.
Soon afterwards, someone piped up that they had vaccinated their kid and now the kid had whooping cough, having never been ill before at any time since birth. Ignoring the fact that this is probably horseshit (because I’m beginning to think that strangers on the internet might not be telling the whole truth 100% of the time), Djehuty-boy sermonised for a minute and then recommended the following:
…So, with nothing better to do, I decided to price that up.
I omitted black pepper and olive oil as I figure those are reasonable things to expect a person to have in their home. Most people also have lemon juice, but in my experience the pre-packaged kind. This is probably a no-no in holistic medical circles. I think I tend to have more citrus fruits in the house than is normal, because I’m an alcoholic and it’s not my fault nobody else knows how to garnish a martini properly. Still, let’s call that a wash and say that everyone has fresh lemons and limes to hand like I do. My game, my rules.
I can say with some certainty that I don’t currently own any Yerba Santa, and I had previously thought the Lobelia was something I was supposed to aim for during oral sex, so everything else would have to be bought in to stop my hypothetical child having whooping cough.
Grand total cost? A hundred and twenty eight pounds and twenty-six pence. In America, that would work out as a hundred and fifty nine dollars at the time of writing. It’s pre-Brexit, so those figures are subject to change when the British economy tanks and we start bartering with shiny beads.
I only checked Amazon for ingredients, and I always took the Prime delivery option where available, because my imaginary child is sick and time is of the essence.* Unfortunately, a lot of the essential oils aren’t available for Prime delivery. Also, I can only find Lobelia in seed form, so my baby is in for a long wait while I grow an entire plant in order to burn it nearby, or whatever the fuck I’m meant to be doing with it to stave off the disease the baby will have already died of while I’m watering the Lobelia seeds.
I appreciate that this was a very quick search — shopping around might pay off, and maybe you know a good Comfrey Root dealer who can hook you up — but even if you managed to cut every price in half, you’re still looking at an eighty dollar outlay, a lot of which is for stuff you’re literally going to set fire to.
Indeed, the diffuser oil is stunningly expensive. Essential Oil of Eucalyptus worked out at £26.63 for 100ml, which is £266 a litre or about a thousand dollars a gallon. It currently costs me about seventy pounds to completely fill my car’s tank, but if my car ran on Eucalyptus Oil it would cost me fifteen and a half grand to refuel. Why the hell aren’t we invading countries that have Euclyptus Oil?!
It also means, according to some quick searches for used cars, that if my car ran out of Eucalyptus it would be cheaper to buy four more identical vehicles than it would be to refill it. Although some of that is down to my having a shitty car and we’re getting off topic.
The topic, of course, is that we have a life to save in the form of my stricken, imaginary kid. What’s really worrying (aside from the fact that there’s apparently nothing that can be done for him or her until the Lobelia has grown) is that I took a gamble on the Spruce oil and got Black Spruce because it was cheaper. I don’t know what the difference is, but boy, is my face going to be red when the plant goop I burn to ward off disease has no effect whatsoever because I tried to save myself some pocket change.
The Fir Needle oil was the real killer, financially, with the price working out at £52.27 per 100ml, or about two and a half grand American per gallon. Assuming that Fir Oil weighs about the same as water (and fuck you if you think I’m ordering some to find out at these prices) then it’s literally more expensive than gold.
It also occurs to me that I don’t own a diffuser, so we can tack on another fifteen pounds (~$16) to our bill for THAT little waste of time, unless I can just throw all these herbs and oils in a pan and light a fire under it. Which still means I’ll probably have to throw out that pan, and those are expensive too.
Of course, we’re ignoring the fact that the two outcomes of all this expense and effort will be Jack and shit. Burning oils and herbal teas aren’t going to cure anything — Fenugreek Seeds were listed as a lactation supplement, so Christ knows what that’s meant to do to an infant. This voodoo bullshit is especially not going to help whooping cough, which is a serious — potentially fatal — and entirely preventable illness. Because there’s a vaccine for it.
Except you can’t trust people who promote vaccines.
They’re only interested in profit.
*I really wish I’d had to get some essence of thyme for that list, because the joke writes itself…