Physician, Take a Hike

Kind of creepy, eh? This showed up in The New York Times Book Review for May 12, 2002, and illustrated Natalie Angier’s review of Michael Gearin-Tosh’s memoir, Living Proof: A Medical Mutiny.

As Angier said, Gearin-Tosh, who had been diagnosed with incurable bone marrow cancer, took “his body, his health, his life into his own cautious, obstinate hands. Gearin-Tosh refused the chemotherapy - hence the subtitle of ‘Living Proof’: ‘A Medical Mutiny’ - and chose instead to put together a semipersonalized program of Chinese breathing exercises, acupuncture, coffee and castor oil enemas, megadoses of vitamins and a diet rich in raw vegetables and fresh juices and stripped of salt, sugar and cooked fat.”

So, in lieu of any better ideas, I drew a kind of “universe” of Gearin-Tosh’s alternative medical regimen: the human head functioning as a kind of a sun, with acupuncture needle-rays, orbited by vitamin-stars, garlic- and turnip-asteroids, apple- and orange-planets, carrot- and onion-comets, banana- and pea pod-moons, and ...an enema-bag space-station? Sounds like the worst bowl of Lucky Charms ever.