I’m feeling too lazy to Google, what other cultures have ancient remedies that are still used today or had very advanced medicine during ancient times? There’s an article on ancient Egyptian medicine citing that they had a pretty decent knowledge of human anatomy. Especially since their mummification rituals required the removal of organs and also the brain via the nose (“When you hear the crunch, you’re there.”)
My recent sickness hasn’t been like the typical cold I get during the changing of the seasons. My cough barely ever involved phlegm or any gross stuff that felt like it was dislodging from my throat. This past week has just been like a constant tickle in my throat and regular cough syrup I think has formula in it intended to work by means other than just soothing your throat.
My kung fu sifu recommended a Chinese cough syrup which is like 10X thicker than regular cough syrup. Watching it pour out is like watching footage from the movie “The Blob.” Surprisingly it didn’t taste awful so it was no problem taking two teaspoons worth. At the very least with this stuff I got the feeling that if its intention was to coat my throat, it would take a more significant amount of fluids to thin it out to any measurable degree.
Right now my cough goes away with cough drops, but resumes instantly once the drop is gone and I swear those things disappear like water.
If I were a Math teacher and a student asked me why is Math important to learn, I’d use this as one of my examples.
Whenever I buy medicine now I think of Seinfeld because of the scene where him and George are comparing ingredients in two different medicines. We did this when buying medicine, do you know what kind it was from the ingredients?
Other Seinfeld bit he has is something like “Strength is out, everything has to be MAXIMUM strength! ‘Give the maximum strength! Give me the maximum possible dosage. Find out what will kill me and then back it off a little.”
Of course, the pills that had this label on them are some of the biggest horse pills I’ve ever taken. I think this might be one of the few exceptions I’ve seen for medicine that usually is trying to make medicine as easy to take as possible. At this point I think the drug companies spend more R&D on how to make the medicine not taste horrible than they do on the actual formula which I assume hasn’t changed all that much if at all.
Really though, the time needed to take medicine is so brief I think bad taste can be tolerated. Most Asian medicine tastes horrible (that’s how they know it works!) and lots are just a packet of the powder which you take with water. I wish I knew what to call some of the medicines I grew up with. Otherwise I’d be going into a store and asking “Uh, it’s the one for your stomach where you need to take 20 little black pills at a time…”
Oh and HAPPY BIRTHDAY MAMA!
I have a bottle of anti-inflammatories that I was prescribed when I sprained my thumb. I wish I had a way to measure exactly how much pressure I’m exerting on the cap in order to open it, because I know it’s that much. Seriously, I feel like if I just turn it enough without pressure the cap will just come off. I remember back when medicine caps really truly were difficult to get off. Will that be something that makes me old? Or does it already? “Back in my day…!”
I try to take as little medicine as necessary, and there are times I wonder if medicine works at all. Yesterday wasn’t one of those days. I was sneezing my butt off feeling gross and icky when I was at work. I felt so crappy I was going to skip my Japanese class even though I had already missed one the previous week because I was out of town. Then another second later I realized I wasn’t sneezing at all so I went to class. That was the first time I had a “This stuff just kicked in!” sort of moment. So I know at least my cold medicine works 
Oftentimes a cashier will put change on the counter instead of in my hand and I wonder why. The germaphobia element is the one explanation I usually come up with, because otherwise it just makes everything take longer as I struggle to pick the change up. I’m not a germaphobe so the only real way I’d do something like this is if it were blatantly evident the person was really sick.
What does it say about your society when on the way to work you have people handing out free painkillers to you?
I like the GLOOP sound effect in addition to the idea of someone shoving an entire ice cream cone into their mouth at once. I’ve never had a severe ice cream headache before. In fact I don’t recall ever getting an ice cream headache, because I thought it was a totally made up thing the first time I heard it.
Ever since the first commercials for drugs like Claritin and the others of the “ask your doctor about…” drugs I’ve been amused by the side effects of all the medicines. The commercials are funny because they’ll have a good five to ten seconds at the end where they list side effects with a montage their diffused lighting slow motion footage of people smiling. It’s easier to ignore the side effects when you have something to watch, but the most amusing is when these commercials are on the radio. The side effects are read so fast that I imagine the visual equivalent are those huge paragraphs of text you see on car commercials you couldn’t even read with an HDTV.
The craziest drug side effects are for the really serious things like the AIDS medications like COMBIVIR. Those ones I read on the subway are stuff like: “liver malfunction and flu.” Now that I think about it I think that particular one was the inspiration for this strip. Some of they symptoms in this strip are made up, but I actually wrote down the side effects of COMBIVIR for use in this strip.
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