Think Big
Hypnotist Lawrence Follas claims he can increase the size of a client’s bust by telling her to imagine her breasts are growing (Sunday News 24 May). He says his client’s breasts have grown 2cm in three months, and some women in the States have added an extra 6cm by the method. The programme involves seven one-hour sessions at $75 each. A tape of Follas’s hypnosis session is given to the woman who must listen to it every day.
The method couldn’t have come at a better time now that the silicone bubble has burst. I imagine many plastic surgeons are quaking in their gowns. I wonder if Mr Follas is planning equivalent therapies for size-challenged men. Not just the mind boggles.
Unforeseen Apathy
All is not well with our psychics. Or so it appeared in a sad story in July 5 Sunday News (which spelt the word “Pyschic”, an interesting variation). A clairvoyants’ association was formed in Nelson by Margaret Birkin because of what she saw as rip-off telephone service bogus psychics flooding the market. (How one can tell the difference between a bogus psychic and the real thing is not divulged).
Ms Birkin, renamed Jane Birkin in the picture of her posing beneath her psychic pyramid, was clearly upset by these “unethical” clairvoyants, but even more upset that not a single person has shown any interest in her society since it was formed last February.
I think she should have foreseen it.
Hillarity
The world’s number one woman is not averse to a little dalliance with mediums. Hillary Clinton came under intense media speculation because of her relationship with famous guru Jean Houstan (Listener 18 July). It was revealed that Houstan had urged Hillary to hold imaginary conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt and Mahatma Gandhi (Hillary apparently drew the line at conversing with Jesus).
I personally feel she might have been more usefully put in touch with the likes of Jacqui Kennedy, Mrs Profumo and Mrs Casanova.
Blessing Jest
Believe it or not …
Maori are no fools. The Ngati Whatua spotted a golden opportunity to make a fast buck when Transit New Zealand started constructing part of the Northern motorway across their land (BOP Times 5 June). They said there was a waahi tapu (sacred site) on the land between Albany and Silverdale, and the workers and motorists there should be blessed frequently for their protection.
Transit fell for it, and are paying the tribe $80 an hour for the frequent blessings; prior to which tractors, graders and other machinery had been mysteriously breaking down (I can’t imagine why). I can see a great future for this tribe, starting with the electric power companies.
Don’t Give Up Your Day Job Doc!
It seems the more precise medical science becomes, the richer grow the alternativists, complementarists, call them what you will. This was the drift of “Scalpel” in an article on the growth of quackery: Religious fervour over homoeopathy reviled (NZ Doctor 22 July).
He described how he stopped to help a teenager injured in a motor accident. Another passer-by thrust a bottle of arnica at the victim “with almost religious fervour”. Scalpel’s writings then got a bit lost in the ethics of unproven medicine in the health service, especially when he said, “Do they (alternative methods) really work? As long as patients are no worse off, it probably doesn’t matter.”
What a pathetic comment! Where did this doctor train, for goodness’ sake? Of course it matters! Why do these misguided docs shrink from their duty, lose their common sense, and take the easy way out? I was taught at medical school never to sanction anything for my patients that I wouldn’t be prepared to take myself, or give to my own family (including mother-in-law).
Dr Scalpel did at least warn his colleagues on going so far as to cease heart, asthma or other important medicines, something that happens around New Zealand, even in our area, all too frequently.
I will finish with his closing words, which show that his heart’s in the right place.
“Must retire for a snooze, so will light a candle, incant awhile, meditate facing Mecca, slip on a copper bracelet, ignite a joss stick, swallow my selenium and garlic pills (and the kelp of course), slip down some mega vitamins, and two or three Berocca, as it has been a stressful day. Beneath the magic crystal swaying by an embroidered wall hanging I should slumber well. Just as well, I have not been improving.”
I think Scalpel must have been at the Healthy Life Expo in Tauranga last weekend. Everything the brain-dead could possibly need was there. The place was packed with scruffy obese would-be health freaks looking for a quick alternative to giving up alcohol, tobacco, drugs, overeating and sloth. I have never seen such an unhealthy collection.
