Monthly Archives: September 2005

Do you remember a few months back there was a story in the papers about some bloke in Galway or some other western county who had an enormous tumour and instead of seeing a real doctor he went to see some kind of homepathic quack?

This person told him that despite the fact the humungous growth on the side of his neck he was fine and that if he just rubbed some dock leaves off it three times a day he’d be fine. Then when it was seeping blood and pus and parts of his organs they told him that he just needed to take the head off a dandelion and collect the white jism that comes out of it, combine it with some magic crystals that she alone could provide and this gigantic cancer would be cured.

Unsurprisingly the patient did not survive and died in terrible pain as this thing burst all over him and by the time he actually did go to a real doctor there was nothing they could do for him.

For reasons I need not go into I saw some of these people on the Late Late Show (Ireland’s longest running talk show) on Friday. One of them was a horrible man in a minging vomity brown suit with a very high forehead who was balding. You can’t trust people like that. Another was an English woman who spoke a lot but said very little. Another was a woman who has some centre called Healing Hands, you can look it up as I’m not linking to it from here, and she was a Reiki master. She looked like a goblin.

There were also two real doctors on the show, two men who had studied and learnt about medicine, chemistry and how to treat people who have illnesses that need to be treated. The main argument from the homo-paths was that because 2,000 years ago someone had discovered that if you rub cabbage leaves off the nipples of pregnant women while they breastfeed it makes them feel better because, it turns out, cabbage leaves contain estrogen.

They talked about tradition and years of practice amongst people in every country. All well and good but if you have a gigantic cancer on your neck are you going to go to a hospital or are you going to treat it with some kind of poultice they used 2000 years ago? Exactly. The man in Galway was stupid but he was hoodwinked by a charlatan. If you think people 2000 years ago didn’t die of cancer and other ailments then by all means put your faith in ground up plants and potions made by people who are no better than Love Potion sellers at a county fair.

If people want to go to someone like this as well as a real doctor then I don’t think anyone can have any problem with it. Maybe they get some psychological benefit from it and that can be important but too many of these flimflammers convince truly sick people to forgo conventional mediciine for a course of treatment that is as useful as a burst dinghy in New Orleans.

There is no evidence their ‘treatments’ work. So you’ve studied for 5 years to be a Reiki master? So fucking what? I could say I’ve studied 10 years to be a Twentosity Master and it’s exactly the same thing. Your magic stones can see a person’s aura and tell us something that medical science can’t? FUCK OFF.

These people are cheats, fraudsters, charlatans and hoaxers. They give people false hope. They don’t help them and by that I mean they do nothing and I mean nothing to cure the illness they’re suffering from. The sick people still die. They still suffer the pain and discomfort of their illness while the plant prescribing, magic stone sporting cunts just go away with a few extra quid in their pockets.

To a man, and woman, I hope they all get cancer in all of their major organs and their faces. I hope they try to cure themselves with their useless elixirs. I hope their families see them suffer. I hope they hurt for a long, long time, the cunts.

They should be outlawed, every single last one of them.