HURRAH FOR BIG PHARMA. GFY HOMEOPATHY.

It is the most normal thing for a parent to die when a child is middle aged.

Normal for now, that is. If it was 150 years ago, it was completely ordinary for kids to pre-decease their parents. Pre vaccines, pre-sanitation, pre-doctors washing their hands, I might have died as a baby, or a toddler, or in childbirth. So what a cheery thing it is that medical advances can keep us alive for so long with antibiotics, vaccines, radiotherapy, insulin, metformin, chemo, androgen blockers, pharmaceutical advances of all kind. What a wonderful thing to be a menopausal woman now, with relatively easy access to the hormones that will prevent my health “falling off a cliff” as my sex hormones decline.

As I often say in this Substack, gleefully countering the alt.wellness zealots, “Hurrah for Big Pharma!” Obviously it’s more complicated than that, but my brain is on Sunday mode and my heart hurts. My Dad is in hospital being kept alive by big pharma and the NHS, and while we are being gifted time we didn’t think we’d have. Time that is unfathomably precious. I know what is coming and it’s hard to know how to process it.

Perhaps a vitriolic Substack will help.

Were I to encounter a treat it with keto diet/herbs/coffee enema/strange experimental internet doctor drug/fasting person right now, I don’t know that I’d have my emotions sufficiently in check not become actual physically violent. Why do people put their faith in stupid things?

I’m not always a fan of Misan Harriman, but I enjoyed his retelling of a conversation about the Holocaust by two great people and thinkers, Kurt Vonnegut and Susan Sontag, in which Sontag describes humanity as 10% of people cruel, 10% merciful and 80% swayable. You can watch it here. It’s caused a hullaballoo. Reform are upset. You choose which 10% they are…