You know what you call alternative medicine that works?

Medicine.

Just a nerdy PSA for those of you out there who think Vitamin C and D or garlic is going to keep coronavirus from killing you. I’ve heard this stuff from friends and colleagues. If you take this holistic concoction, it will lessen the symptoms. If you take Airborne, it will boost your immune system and the virus will have to look elsewhere for a victim. If you take garlic, wait, I don’t know what’s supposed to happen with garlic. Maybe it has something to do with bat viruses and Dracula.

The evidence that any of these things will help is sketchy. The vitamin C thing has been touted for years as a treatment for colds but personally? I’ve never found that it helped very much if at all.

None of these things are necessarily bad for you, though you might want to go easy with the vitamin D. Garlic is supposed to be good for your cardiovascular system so eat as much of that as you like. But for most holistic and Ayurvedic alternative medicines, the concentrations of the active ingredient is low or the ability of that active ingredient to get into your system via your stomach or gut is low. If that weren’t the case, you’d have to have a prescription to buy garlic.

Sure there are a lot of potent natural products. Don’t eat foxglove. It’s just that natural doesn’t mean effective in this case. And as far as the body goes, it can’t tell the difference between a “natural” source of a molecule and a synthetic one.

I guess what I’m trying to say is I hear you. I hear the frustration of not being able to go anywhere, of being cooped up in the house all the time, of not seeing your family or friends. Of eating at Chez Vous for the last 5 months. Don’t they ever change the menu?

It’s a pain to remember to wear a mask, to disinfect every surface everyone has touched. To wash your hands until their chapped.

But there is no cure.

So, the best way to stay alive and prevent the spread is to do what you’re already doing. Take it seriously. Don’t let your guard down. I know young people in their 20s who had a brief encounter with a spreader in the first days of reopening and this virus kicked their asses.

Eventually, it’s up to you how you treat yourself. There just isn’t a cure on the horizon in the next few months, if then.

Be careful.

Too many titles for this one

Such as:

Person Woman Man Camera TV

Who’s a good boy?!?

Europe vows to NEVER let us back in.

Really?? Not like, “What is the 4th amendment to the Constitution?”

See Sara Cooper:

Is this some kind of bizarre strategy to get Floridian seniors back on his side? That’s the only way it makes any sense to keep on flogging this. Maybe there are seniors down there fuming that their kids are trying to get guardianship of the family wealth because dad is running around The Villages in a golf cart shrieking about “white power!!”.

Is it code for something? Person Woman Man CAMERA TV. Maybe it’s a Fox News trigger word sequence that will activate a hypnotic suggestion.

If he’s repeating this because he’s trying to reassure us that he’s not stupid or infirm, well, it’s not working.