Memo: to the FDA
From: Superfriend’s super host.
In re: Feeling just fine
I’d just like to take a moment out of my busy day to tell the FDA that I’m feeling great. I’ve been hosting these worms since October and I’m feeling better than I have in years. I know that I’ve empathized with the FDA in the past; understood that it is difficult for a large bureaucracy to function in an effective manner and asserted that no individual FDA employee was “out to get” any one in particular. But, I have also said that there is a big problem with an agency that allows glaucoma medication to be relabeled for the “disease” of thin eyelashes, and lets slaughter houses use scraps fit for dog food as meat for fast food hamburgers.
There has been some mumbling lately about the use of chemical extracts of helmenths for use in the treating of some disease. The rational here being that there are too many unknown variables with the live worm and really shouldn’t we just extract what we need. I believe, however, that they have the logic squarely backwards. In any system there will always be chaotic, unpredictable elements, but in the case of helmenths, and other flora and fauna that the human race has been living with for eons, the randomness in the systems is rather well understood by its users.
For example, Mediterranean people with Favism know that contact with the pollen and fruit of the broad bean causes a predictably terrible physiological experience, but it protects them from Sickle Cell Anemia, in a way that a laboratory created medicine may not—and most importantly we can not know what kind of side effects the unmitigated extracts will cause. Years and years of drug trials can not create the level of understand that a cultural heritage has accumulated. We know what N. Amercanus will do to a body, at all different infection levels, because we have millennia of folk documentation telling the story in detail. That is not anecdotal evidence, that is the kind of self reporting, self correcting research any epidemiologist would love to have.
Then let me add one more voice to Necator Americanus’ story. I feel great. I’ve tapered my steroids down to 15mg and plan to decrease to zero my no later than the end of February. My temperature is stable, my weight is increasing, my energy has returned to a normal human level, I am no longer bleeding or shedding mucous, and I am reabsorbing water in my large intestines, as I was meant to do. FDA do you understand the implications of this? Do you know that you have shut down yet another purveyor of good because you “officially” could not understand what he was doing? Because just as ten thousand years of eating unpasteurized cheese and drinking raw milk couldn’t be reconciled to the needs of industrial agriculture; hosting live worms can not be reconciled with the needs of industrial pharmacology.
There are broader implications here, chaos in the system that one may not even have considered. To wit: there comes a time in any empire that it begins to choke on it’s own bureaucracy, it is at this point that the people begin to suspect that the government is not working for them, but for it’s own sustenance and that of its donors. It is at that moment that the people begin to abdicate and go their own way. Some smoking marijuana or self infecting with worms to relieve illness, but others doing ridiculous things, such as rejecting childhood or influenza vaccinations, home schooling their children, joining “Tea Party” movements, and generally undermining the fabric of society. This is not the time to retrench, increase penalties, and push harder against the zeitgeist. This is the time to step back and say, are we the chaos in our system, what have we stubbornly not understood, what are we doing wrong?
Get back to me, FDA, when you’ve worked out some kind of cogent answer. If I’m home that day, instead of out enjoying life, like a well person, I’ll be glad to talk you about it.
