Smedley discovers a brain scan

Please welcome Smedley again.

I know science and you don't

My funding from my backers proves that I am a scientist, but I get disturbing letters like this one:

Dear Smedley:

Calling yourself a scientist does not make you one! You just make stuff up!

Sincerely,

[Sick people's organisation]

That hurts my feelings and I want them to take it back. Also, it is clearly a death threat as you can see right there. I will not report it to the police because I am brave.

The debate

The debate is over my well-grounded theory that millions of ordinary men, women, and children have too much subconscious fun getting AIDS-like diseases.

Some raise silly objections that you can't get that sick (or even create swelling in your hand and arm) by having bad thoughts, but I have proof.

Proof

Here is a brain scan that can only have been made with our special North Manchester equipment. This is from a moderate sufferer. He is a housebound man in his 20s:

You can see the fun in the right hemisphere.

The opportunistic infections, deaths and so on and so forth (you know, those vague symptoms) that occur in these diseases are merely the inevitable result when the right hemisphere is allowed to take over.

How it works

The sicker you are, the more subconscious fun you are having (obviously) and therefore the less sick you are:

• If you have one symptom, then you are unwell.

  We will set you up with an advanced mobile application that will help you decide when to go to the loo.

• If you have two symptoms, then you are having twice as much subconscious fun and are twice as healthy.

  Here we train you to answer questionnaires. If we help you to answer that you are better, then we will mark you down as better. This is evidence-based.

• If you have 50 or more signs, symptoms, and diseases in an AIDS-like and MS-like fashion, and you are housebound or bedridden and in constant pain, then you are having oodles and oodles of subconscious fun and you are perfectly healthy.

  The way we cure you in this case is to exclude you from every study ever performed. This is beyond doubt.

Expanding

We are applying this principle to more and more parts of medicine. Globally influential diagnostic standards are being revised right now to reclassify many diseases in our direction. Doctors will eventually become obsolete.

It is a happy stroke of luck that we not only help people like you, but also help the interests of our impartial backers, whose only goal is to advance knowledge using our scientific and impartial profession.

William Smedley

About Smedley

Sir William Smedley was instrumental in proving that Bhopal was more subconsciously fun for the victims than a barrel of monkeys. Literally, he used monkeys to prove this. That work earned the prestigious Dow Early Assessment of True Health award.

Smedley lives in North Manchester, UK with his tamarins Id, Ego, and Superego.¹

Acknowledgements

Smedley thanks VaXzine on Flickr.com for making the above brain image available under Creative Commons.

He says, "splendid radiography".

Footnotes:

¹ Smedley had trouble choosing between the red-handed tamarin Saguinus midas and bare-faced tamarin Saguinus bicolor until he discovered the cotton-headed tamarin, Saguinus oedipus.