When I was a child, I had the bizarre belief that when I was sick, I could be cured by eating onion rings. I don't know how I came up with that. My mother tried to talk me out of it, but usually after I kept insisting it would work, she would get me some onion rings (maybe just to demonstrate that it didn't work?). Most of the time I felt better after eating them. I'm sure it was all in my head.
But the weird part is that even now that I am an adult, this still usually works. I know how absurd it is, and that actually, eating onion rings when I am sick should make me sicker or at least have no effect, but it still works. Is it some kind of psychosomatic voodoo?
1 comment:
When I was a child and I was ill, my mother gave me 7-up, saltines, and chicken soup. And when I got better I was certain that those things had assisted in my recovery. Years later I found that I still believed those things to be 'medicine', imbued with some healing power, some synergetic effect that would not be apparent unless all three ingredients were present.
Nowadays I believe that many common over-the-counter drugs (and some prescription drugs too, surely) work by the same principle: Somebody In Authority tells you it will work, you take it, you get better, and you decide that it was the prescribed 'cure' that caused your recovery. Unfortunately its not a very testable hypothesis; a true test would involve following multiple you's through quantum branching of the universe and observing how the you that took the alleged cure fared compared to the you that did not.
Sometimes I think that this might actually be happening, and through some freak violation of the laws of probability this 'I' has been the one to go down the 'remains ill' path over and over again. (I hope that other 'I', the lucky bastard, is appreciative.)
In the end I've only got myself to blame, I guess... after I became vegetarian the chicken soup option was not available to me, with predictable results. My mojo isn't working.
So as for the onion rings: whatever gets you through the night, man. Life's too short to live sans mojo.
Post a Comment