Podcasts #1

[metaphortunate]

tam_nonlinear introduced me to Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine, and I love it. She's the doctor, he's the doofus, and it makes me laugh out loud at least once per episode.

Now, I am always grateful to live in the era of vaccines, antibiotics, and handwashing. I've always known that we are so damn lucky to have so many actual cures for things, that work. What this podcast is making me aware of is how lucky we are to not have so many damn things that don't work. Like, when you have a fever, Tylenol may or may not help, but at least you don't have anyone demanding that you rub your head with cowshit mixed with honey, eat a frog boiled in oil, then tie some bread to a tree. ("Can I at least skip the tying the bread to the tree?" "God, it's like you don't even want to get better.")

We still have a bunch of expensive shit that doesn't work, but the natural habitat of expensive shit that doesn't work is ailments for which we don't have anything that does work, so every remedy we discover not only cures an ailment but also erases a bunch of bullshit. It's great.

Comments

[tam_nonlinear]

I'm glad you're enjoying it! It's a great podcast, but kinder and funnier than I would have expected from the description, but yeah, there's an awful lot of "WHY did anyone think that would help? WHY?". My favorite on that would be the episode on bloodletting, where they discussed the fact that bloodletting was sometimes used as a treatment for... excessive blood loss. I suspect that didn't work very well.

[lightgetsin]

Boy, I don't know. I am reminded strongly of my wife's trip through radiation, a mere five years ago. It was an incredibly choreographed, high-tech, science adventure with absolute piles of research behind it, and years of experience and high success rates. I mean, if you've got to have radiation, this is the sort you want to get, is what I'm saying. "Oh by the way," they said, "after the first dose, you need to suck on hard candies for a couple days. That will keep saliva flowing and protect your mouth from damage."

Fast forward less than three years and, whoops, it turns out the random bouts of weird and painful face swelling are the result of ... wait for it ... irradiated salivary glands. Resulting from sucking on hard candies. Which, it turns out, is the absolute worst thing you can do post radiation, because it literally draws irradiated material through the glands over and over again.

We don't know shit, is what I'm saying. Even when it looks like we do.

[metaphortunate]

I get what you're saying, and medicine is definitely picking up shells next to the vast ocean of its ignorance, but... your wife got her cancer taken out by radiation. I mean, that is amazing. Highly imperfect, but still, holy shit. E's mom died of cancer. The Junebug was asking about it the other night. We explained that cancer is an awful disease...and that she beat it twice. It came back a third time, but medicine gave her a number of extra years. She got to see our wedding. She had a lot more time with her kids. I can't agree that we don't know shit. There is a lot we don't know, and hopefully in twenty years we'll be embarrassed by our ignorance as of 2015, but...we are doing a lot better than cowshit mixed with honey.

[nextian]

delurking to say: Thanks for the rec! I've been binging these over the last few days and I just adore them.

[metaphortunate]

Aren't they great? They're just so charming.