Department of Just Sayin’
Aka, Is It Over Yet?
I hate New Year’s Eve. Always have. Correction: there have been breaks in the “always.” Including the years my family celebrated with neighbor/friends, sharing a dinner-and-games night. But mostly, it has always been a strange, awkward(t) kind of evening – an I should be having fun dammit/why am I not light-hearted and care-free kind of night. Instead, it’s a reminder of how quickly the last year flew by, what was intended and what fell through the cracks, one more reminder of dreams gone by/deferred, one more year closer to admitting dreams that were never to be realized….
Cry me a river. Pass the popcorn; it’s 12:24 am, is the last yahoo done banging the damn pot lids/setting off the mortars and can I go to sleep now and wake up and pretend it’s March already?
“Is it midnight yet? Have we had fun?”
* * *
Happy New Year, Indeed
MH’s attention was drawn to a certain object on the dish air drying rack. I waited for the inevitable comment.
“What’s this?” he asked, with a Twinkle in His Eye ® . He picked up the object, turned it back and forth in his hand, and attempted to unscrew its top.
“It does not take batteries,” I smirked, “and no, it’s not what you’re thinking.”
a pestle without its mortar is like a fish without a bicycle.
* * *
Start the New Year clean with this “detoxifying” dietary supplement, transdermal patch, kidney-flushing herbal tea, colon cleanser….
The come-on email that somehow escaped my spam filter, caused me pause for a moment to consider the quackery that is not just particular to the holiday season.
“Detoxing – the idea that you can flush your system of impurities and leave your organs squeaky clean and raring to go – is a scam.
It’s a pseudo-medical concept designed to sell you things.”
“Let’s be clear,” says Edzard Ernst, emeritus professor of complementary medicine at Exeter University, “there are two types of detox: one is respectable and the other isn’t.”
The respectable one, he says, is the medical treatment of people with life-threatening drug addictions. “The other is the word being hijacked by entrepreneurs, quacks and charlatans to sell a bogus treatment that allegedly detoxifies your body of toxins you’re supposed to have accumulated.”
I generally hold and/or bite my tongue when otherwise seemingly intelligent (or obviously dense but well-meaning and nice) folks uses the Important-And-Sciency-Sounding-Poison-Language © with me. The young man who, after finishing giving me a blissful foot massage advised me to drink a lot of water in the next few hours to help my body “flush out of toxins” stimulated by the massage? I just smiled dreamily. I was under the spell of the massage’s endorphin rush; I didn’t have the energy to mouth a simple, if sincerely incredulous, Dude, really? What are you saying, and who told you that?
Toxins? What, exactly, are these toxins?
I often wonder if the purveyors of toxin-speak even know the definition of the word they use so heedlessly yet authoritatively?
A toxin (from Ancient Greek: τοξικόν toxikon) is a poisonous substance produced within living cells or organisms.
So, you’re saying, without blood test results or other evidence to back up your claim, that there is poison in my body? What, someone slipped rattlesnake venom in my tea?
When I ask for evidence of specific toxins that are lurking, unflushed, in my body, [1] I receive analogies. The toxin-believing crowd can’t exactly describe what the toxins are, nor what the detox process is, so they resort to analogies. False analogies. “Just like we wash our hair and brush our teeth…” My favorites are the ones having to do with a machine: “Just like we must periodically flush our car’s coolant system…”
That is incorrect; you forfeit the bonus round.
As much as it may seem to have a mind of its own, [2] your Honda Civic is not a living organism. Machines have no way to clean themselves. The crucial systems of the human body evolved to do so. The kidneys, liver, bowels – the organs most frequently cited by the Toxin Touters – all are self-cleansing. When they fail, due to disease or injury or abuse, medical intervention is necessary.
This is your liver.
This is your liver on David Crosby
Like all fast fixes – from miracle diets to wrinkle creams – the idea that we can wash away our lifestyle transgressions with a pill, a drink, a gargle or even an “internal cleanse” [3] is an attractive idea to some, and much easier than making changes to nutrition, exercise and other lifestyle habits. [4] And most of us seem to hold some vague ideas that we are doing something wrong, or that our modern, technologically dependent life contaminates us with…well, with bad things. [5] And we need to get rid of these bad things.
Harriet Hall, aka “the SkepDoc,” is a retired physician and former Air Force flight surgeon who researches and writes about medicine, so-called “alternative and complementary medicine,” and quackery and critical thinking. According to Hall, the detox industry’s rhetoric is “… reminiscent of religious fasting and purification rites (Jewish mikvah, shamans using smoke, American Indians sweat lodges). It’s mysticism, not science.”
Our bodies come equipped with livers, kidneys, stomachs, intestines, enzymes and metabolic processes that deal with toxins efficiently with no outside help. When kidneys fail, we use dialysis. In certain cases of poisoning with large amounts of heavy metals, we may use chelation therapy. In addiction treatment, “detox” is achieved by simply abstaining from drugs or alcohol for a few days. ….. there is no medical evidence to support any other methods or benefits of “detoxification.” [6]
* * *
Department of Ch-ch-ch changes
As of January 1, 2015, Scarletta Press, publisher of my middle grade novel, The Mighty Quinn, is no longer Scarletta Press. The Publisher Formerly Known as Scarletta is now Mighty Media Press. And they have this to say about that:
Mighty Media Press delivers captivating books and
media that ignite a child’s curiosity, imagination,
social awareness, and sense of adventure.
Mighty Kids. Mighty Minds. Mighty Future.
Be Mighty!
Although I like the name change, I be mighty skeptical (if just a bit less mighty hopeful) as to how this will impact their promotion efforts for one of their Scarletta titles…even though, one might reasonably think, The Mighty Quinn, ahem, hello, can you say, “tie-in?” I knew you could.
“The what formerly known as what?”
* * *
Department of Because It Works
Dateline: New Year’s Day. MH and I, out for a walk. MH asks if I’m taking him to Sports Look, a local restaurant/sport bar, for dinner. “For dinner?” I am confused. I know he’s referring to being able to watch The Rose Bowl game (it’s only being broadcast on ESPN, and we are the holdouts who don’t have cable), which is mildly important to us this year, lukewarm college sports fans that we are, because an Oregon team is playing a Florida team. But the game starts at 2pm, I reminded him, not dinner time. Also, it’s New Year’s Day, and, remember, I always make Hoppin’ John on New Year’s Day.
I picked up that tradition – serving black-eyed peas and rice, green and some cornbread concoction “for luck and prosperity in the New Year” – from my Tennessee-raised father. I maintain the tradition partially because I like my version of Hoppin’ John, and partially in memory of my dad.
Besides, I explained to MH, I want us to benefit from the folk wisdom of poor people who ate beans and rice every year, believing it would bring them good luck and prosperity, who then again the following year were too poor to serve anything fancier than beans and rice on New Year’s Day.
Remember how well it worked last year?
* * *
Department of Making My Daughter Groan
Driving home from lunch, Belle pointed out a rainbow grazing the horizon. “Now, if there were two of them,” I wondered aloud, “would the first one be the rainbow and the other a rainbro?”
* * *
An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.
(Bill Vaughn)
Happiness is too many things these days for anyone to wish it on anyone lightly. So let’s just wish each other a bile-less New Year and leave it at that.
(Judith Crist)
* * *
May the happiness you seek be bile-free, and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
[1] And I have done this, with those who have used the toxin jargon.
[2] Especially when piloted by teen drivers.
[3] It’s only two days into the new year and I just don’t want to type enema.
[4] Why give up my bi-weekly craft beer six pack & cheesecake fest when I can do a bi-yearly liver cleanse?
[5] I actually think this is likely true, but want evidence before I put any purported “cleanser” up my hoo-haw, an organ which evolved to expel, not intake.
[6] Detox Quackery (Harriet Hall, the SkepDoc, Skeptic, v. 14 #1 2008)
