Humour: Guardian Talk: The Barefoot Doctor, live online. This is the funniest thing I’ve read in months — thanks Tom!
(Background: ‘The Barefoot Doctor’ is the ‘healer’ who writes for The Observer Magazine on ‘wellbeing, alternative therapies and medicines and ways to cope with modern life’. Everything can apparently be healed through kidney massage and a few essential oils.)
Q: A case study, Mr Barefoot: my bus has crashed – I’ve got a compound fracture in my right leg, the bone is sticking out from under the skin and is wedged into the ‘Used Tickets’ receptacle, my skull has had a good old thump against the seat in front and is impersonating a boiled egg after the first thump with the teaspoon, and my ribs have been broken into bits like a packet of smokey bacon crisps someone has stood on.
What herbs and aromatic oils would you recommend?
Doc: you may jest – however, aromatic oils or potions can be extremely effective in speeding the healing process eg – manuka honey,lavender, marigold etc – thanks for bringing it up
Q: oooh good answer. yes i’m going out to buy some manuka honey right away. what do you do with it, is it nice on toast?
lavender, marigolds? is he opening a kitchen department?
Q: My unfortunate friend received a quite severe beating in the street a few days ago and has since been passing blood in his urine, in copius amounts.
Can recomend any effective massage oils for my friend? Its quite urgent because he’s beginning to talk incoherently about bright lights, can’t move and fainting.
Thank you, 3000
(… snip several hundred similar hilariously bitchy ‘questions’… Barefoot Doctor disappears for a while…)
Q: Where is he? Maybe the Barefoot Cab Driver who learnt to drive by karmic chanting has driven into a tree — or can’t find first gear?
(BTW the real ‘barefoot doctors’ were a different kettle of fish entirely; ‘part-peasant, part-doctor’ commune-level health workers in revolutionary China.)