Now, franksolich is no medical professional, but this is based upon what I was told years and years ago, when I worked at the Nebraska Department of Health and used to spend my coffee breaks in the basement of the state office building with a physician who for whatever reasons found me interesting (I think it had something to do with deafness and speech, but whatever).
This physician, recently deceased, was originally from Minnesota, and a proud Democrat-Farmer-Labor guy, but he'd been a country doctor down in Kansas for circa twenty years before moving up to Nebraska. Despite his politics, I found him eminently commonsensical on matters medical; among other things, we both agreed that people take w-a-a-a-a-a-y too many pharmaceuticals with w-a-a-a-a-a-a-y too many unanticipated or unknown side-effects, and that they take them because they're lazy; they don't want to change their life-styles. Downing pills is easier.
He was the medical guy; I wasn't. I found his wealth of medical information awesome, and used it all the time.
One time during coffee-break, I mentioned it seemed one of my bosses had haemorrhoids, a deduction gotten from the way he grimaced, the way he walked, the way he sat. I'd been critical of this boss before, finding him an insufferable bore and grouch, and the physician suggested I connect the two.
After that, I did an informal observation of those working around me (there were then 400 employees of the department, nearly all with whom I was more than just casually acquainted)--and yes, yes, yes, it seemed true. It was too unanimous to be anything else but true. Anal problems make one a grouch, a bitch, a Sad Sack, or all of these.
And by sheerest of coincidences--or perhaps not--all those afflicted thusly were known to me to be Democrats.
Sometime later I inquired of the physician why, if people were suffering so, they put up with it. After all, we all had excellent medical insurance coverage, and these were not stupid people; this after all was the Department of Health, where those working there ostensibly had better than a layman's knowledge of diet and health.
He said he was never really sure, but it seemed to him in all of his years of medical practice, there's some people who simply like to be wretched and miserable.
And then he directed me to Freud and other famous psychiatrists who had written much on the connection between bowel problems and personality, or character, problems. It appears that many--maybe even as much as 90%--personality perversions, deviations, and negative quirks are anally-based. If one's got problems down in there, one's got problems that emerge to the surface.
I've been reading the cooking and baking, the health, the chronic problems, the mental health, the diet, the exercise forums, on Skins's island for years now, and it does strike me that the primitives have an extraordinary propensity to suffer afflictions of their alimentary canal.
I've never seen so many sore asses as I've seen on Skins's island.
And like Saul on the Road to Damascus, the revelation--the primitives are primitives because they've got all these rectal problems, and don't want to get rid of them, despite that such problems are easily eliminated or at least ameliorated with just a little bit of a change in their diets.
They'd rather be victims; they'd rather do drugs.
Or if they try to get rid of such problems, the primitives apply the wrong remedies.
Take dear cali, the bitter old Vermontese cali primitive, for example. She's got all this pent-up bitterness, rage, and Hate inside of her, which she honestly wants to purge out of herself. She doesn't like this shit staying inside of her, taking up room, petrifying and fossilizing, never getting it expulsed.
However, she supposes that instead of healthy remedies such as love, affection, tolerance, warmth, giving, sharing, she thinks her expressions of anger and Hate provide a good laxative. Actually, bitterness, rage, and Hate are constipators, and the more one is that way, the more the shit builds up inside of one, never coming out.
But obviously, the majority of the primitives don't want to purge themselves of internal toxic substances, even though such is s-o-o-o-o-o-o easily done. They rather enjoy being grouches, bitches, Sad Sacks, hypochondriacs, cranks.
Why, escapes me.
