Cure All Medicine

Flashback to Thanksgiving 2001. Somebody at our annual family get together brings along the game Outburst, by Parker Brothers. If you have never played Outburst, it is a game where a topic is given along with ten terms that are related to that topic. The goal is for your team to get the most items off the list by bursting out answers that fit the subject.

We quickly determined that this game sucks because our copy was from the eighties and most of the answers weren't culturally relevant any more. References we didn't know, and also that many of the categories and their answers were too difficult for us. When you are in a culture where the highlight of the year for most of the people is the several gutted white tail deer carcasses hanging from the pole that is a mere fifty feet away, you can’t expect anybody to be able to shout out the names of ten French theater actors from before 1985.

Anyways, after declaring the game a bomb, I start going through the question cards to see what kind of cock-eyed questions were being asked back in the eighties. Soon I hit a card that caught my interest. The category was Cures for Insomnia. Since I often am affected by insomnia I gave the card a look in hopes of finding an answer, or at the very least, a third party who says it is ok to take sixty milliliters of NyQuil every night of the year.

I believe it was cure number six that first made me blink in astonishment. The cure for insomnia was none other than go to sleep. Yes, that is pretty much the same thing as going to a doctor for help with impotence, and he tells you to just go get a boner. It just doesn't work that way. Going to sleep is not a solution, it is the desired end result.

I set that aside and kept reading the list, only to quickly be forced to blink twice in astonishment. Another prescribed cure for Insomnia, according to Parker Brothers, was none other than death.

Death

Death. The same cure prescribed to horses who break a leg. The same cure prescribed to infidels by the clergy in thirteenth century Europe. Death, now being prescribed to us who are having a little trouble getting some shut eye.

After giving the subject a little bit of thought, it dawned on me what a powerful drug death is. Why should we spend billions in research for cures to diseases? The good people at Parker Brothers have shown through Outburst that death is a viable cure for insomnia. So why can we not apply this to other diseases?

Just think about it, Herpes, Cancer, Dengue Fever, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, Leprosy, Toxoplasmosis, Boy Bands, Shingles, Hidradentis Suppurativa, Jock Itch, Gout, Meningitis, and Diverticulitis. Those diseases, plus many many more all share a common cure.

Death.

Parker Brothers, you are true heroes. For that, I salute you.