Blood-letting

Throw that Time Machine into reverse! "Out with the old, in with the new!!" We're going to ancient Greece!!!!!

Back through Dr. Salk's time! Back through tuberculosis patients kept in Mammoth Cave! Back through the discovery of ether as an anesthetic! Back! BACK! Back beyond the discovery of the human skeleton! Back beyond the Middle Ages!! Back beyond Mary and Joseph in the barn!! Back all the way to 400 BCE.

Ah! Greece!! The time of Zeus and Hera! The time of Aphrodite and Hermes! The time of a whole bunch of bad information!

Look over there! The catapult has just been invented! There goes Socrates philosophising away! He doesn't know that next year he'll be killed by drinking hemlock. Poor fellow!

There's Hippocrates slicing open a vein in a guy to let out the bad blood; just like our buddy, Ashok T. Jaisinghani, thinks will cure AIDS. You'll remember Mr. Jiggywithit from the earlier post on Vitamin K.

This time, Mr. Jocularity is even offering a reward of 50,000 rupees to any doctor who can prove that blood-letting won't help AIDS at all! 50,000!!! That sounds like a lot, doesn't it! I bet I could buy a whole car with that!

After a quick trip to the calculator with today's exchange rate in hand, I discover that 50,000 rupees--that Oh-so-big-sounding number!--is really only about $1,100. Crap! I was hoping for a new car.....

Regarding this pittance of a reward, Mr. Jamababa says that "Only crazy persons would attempt to prove the impossible." Something tells me that Mr. Jiggerofwhiskeytoomany knows a lot about crazy people. You know... Being crazy enough to think that blood-letting will cure any infection, much less AIDS.

Mr. Jaundice goes on to complain about "multi-national companies" making money off of the "ignorant and panic-stricken AIDS patients" of India. And, while Mr. Jamminhandin here isn't asking for any money for his really, really bad advice he still is hurting people. The very same panic-stricken people he's trying to protect.

Finally, a person with HIV/AIDS has many, many frequent and regular blood tests. After all those trips to the phlebotomist; after all that blood is removed on a regular basis; after all of those little vials of blood are taken you would think--if blood-letting did anything--that somone, somewhere, at sometime would have been healed of AIDS.