The thing that gets me about a lot of pseudoscientific medicine is the baffling way in which they view the human body.
It isn’t the inaccuracy that gets to me; we have a long history of just fucking guessing how the body works. It’s not even the extreme simplicity of their models. It’s how vulnerable they seem to think it is.
I mean, the skin is a barrier. It keeps stuff in and it keeps stuff out. Yes, there is some limited permeability; if you smear the right kinds of things on your skin then a little bit will get into your body (this is how topical anaesthetics work, and why we wear gloves in chemical labs). But some people are like “smooth this acai berry cream on your skin to boost your immune system!” [note: you DO NOT WANT to boost your immune system], or “put a raw potato under your armpit to draw to toxins out of your body!” or some shit. I look at those foot bath things that fill up with yellow rust as you use them and people go, “all that yellow stuff is the toxins being drawn out through your feet!” and I am horrified at their mental model for how the body works. They know your insides are protected by skin, right? Right?? If I thought my body was that permeable I’d wear a hazmat suit at all times. What if I touch some mud that’s got Toxins in it and they all get absorbed into my body? What if I use the wrong root vegetable under my armpit and it sucks all the vitamins out of my blood instead? That’s terrifying!
“Drink alkaline water every morning to keep your blood pH high!” Friend, how vulnerable is your blood to pH changes? You know that a fairly small variation can kill you?? If I thought this worked I’d never eat fermented foods again. I’d never clean with vinegar in case my Super Permeable Frog Skin absorbed all the acid into my blood and I died of acidemia.
“This essential oil gives you energy! This one boosts your immune system!” They’re for smells! They make smells! In your view, how much of my metabolism and immune regulation are dependent on what my environment smells like?? Am I going to die because I bought the Strawberry Surprise scented candle instead of sandalwood and my body forgot how to make ATP?? What???
The extreme fragility that they perceive in the human body, with apparently no barriers or regulatory mechanisms, vulnerable to such tiny changes in diet and environment, would terrify me. If I thought of the body like this I would never leave the house.
Heyyyyy, it’s that thing that I wrote a 350-page dissertation about from a slightly different perspective (fears of radioactive contamination)! I argued that this obsessive anxiety about the permeability of the body has to do with an increased awareness of the fact that in a conceptual sense the body actually DOESN’T have a firm barrier between what is “it” and “not-it”— a normal, healthy body is always permeable and infiltrated, and our new ability to visualize this leads to a lot of uncertainty about how to sustain our basic model of the discrete, independent, rational person. (If we’re always “contaminated” by other substances and creatures, then how do we know what the authentic “us” is?) So that gets expressed through increasingly drastic efforts to “purify” the body, and intense fears about what will happen if this can’t be done.
So in other words: OP, I agree.
This post has passed peer review.
Now we can publish it in the scholarly Tumblr Journal of Discourse.
