Having trouble with my IBS right now. My Bs are very I, and it’s making me S. (Sad.)

The usual suspects have been rounded up and found guilty on summary judgment. I ate supper too fast (a habit I fall into slowly over time until something like this comes to slap some sense in to me), supper included a carbonated beverage (not a prime cause ut never helpful in these cases), and a new contender, supper was canned chili, which normally does not bother my system apart from a little extra gas. But it was no doubt the instigator of this particular gastrointestinal clusterfuck.

Then again, this sort of thing was building up over the last week. Wednesday night, my watching Daily Show plus Colbert with Joe and Julian (aka J&J) was curtailed by an attack of the I to the B of the S. Normally I consider that time to be sacred, and the highlight of my day. But my B had other ides.

So something is up inside me for sure. I have had a few allergy attacks lately, and that might not be a coincidence. I have this theory (of course I have a theory) that a lot of my physical complaints are the result of an aggressive and excessive body-wide inflammatory response set off by my allergy attacks.

It makes sense. Joint pain, irritable bowels, sinus blockages… these could all be the result of widespread inflammation. Research has been pointing to inflammation due to an out of control immune system attacking the body’s own tissues as potentially being the culprit in a lot of illnesses. Perhaps I have the same problem, but at a histamine level.

Certainly, I have felt unwell lately. IBS aside, I have been having trouble with lack of appetite and generally feeling pretty icky in the tummy. My stomach has been going crazy acidic lately, enough to scare me. And my bacl has been killing me, even more than it usually does.

So something is off. Waaaay off. Not for the first time in my life, I wish there was a human body shop where you could go for a biological tune-up. Check your fluids, rebalance your inner ear, clean everything out. All while you wait! Or even while you sleep.

Imagine that. You wake up feeling fresh and healthy and hydrated in a comfy bed. I would pay $100, no prob.

Not often, mind you. But whenever I could!

But back to my actual suffering. I think part of the problem is that I am dehydrated. (Just add water.. instant Fru. ) My shift to spending most of my computer time on my tablet and hence in my bed has put a major crimp on my usual habit of more or less constant hydration, and I think my body is rebelling against that. I will have to work harder to give my body plenty of fluids for flushing out toxins.

Darn those naughty toxins. Always ruining things. They are just so darn pesky!

The whole idea of ridding yourself of toxins has come under attack from the pack of gleeful fucktards who call themselves “skeptics” lately. They decry it as pseudoscience and ask where are these mysterious “toxins” and how can you scientifically prove they are gone?

To them, I ask, “Why do you think we have kidneys? To filter out toxins! Both the ones that our bodies produce as a by-product of metabolism and the ones we get from eating and breathing in this filthy world.

From there, it is but a small step to imagine that sometimes our kidneys don’t get it all and some of those toxins end up in our tissues anyhow, and fuck things up. Add in the vast number of bizarre and unnatural (but wonderful) thing we touch all the time and the microparticles of everything everywhere that we inhale all the time and it seems to be quite plausible to imagine that a slow but steady buildup of toxins our bodies were not evolved to handle could give a person a feeling of overall malaise and physical depression.

That said, I am sure there is a lot of voodoo and woowoo mixed in with this idea. I am sure a lot of people are sold a lot of treatments that either do nothing except via placebo effect, or make people feel better in a lot of the old standbys of fad health “cures” : a diuretic to flush you out, a laxative to empty you out, a broad spectrum multivitamin to top you up, and of course, a stimulant to perk you up.

All of those can be found in any number of “natural” cures, and so the sellers of these odd cures are not necessarily mustachioed villains selling quack nostrums out of the back of their snake oil wagons.

Like healers of ages past, they put together something they think will work, get people to try it, some of those people get marvelous results and clamor for more, and so they make more and sell it suddenly they have a business.

As far as they can tell, it works. They don’t need to know why. Sure, in a perfect world, I suppose they would be all scientific and figure out which are the active ingredients (if any) and subject them to rigorous testing, and blah blah blah.

But not everyone can do that, and in my opinion, if someone feels bad, takes a treatment, and feels better, that is actual medicine even if scientifically it’s hogwash.

If you truly are a healer, then all you care about is making people feel better, and thus, you are willing to do whatever it takes to achieve that goal, and if that means the old sugar pill (or in my case, sucralose pill), then so be it.

A lot of times, what people really need is to know someone cares. The adult equivalent of your mother kissing your boo-boos to make them better.

It was never the chemical properties of the kiss that made it feel better.

It was the love.