HOMEOPHOBIA

I said, “What do you recommend for me? I’ve got a sniffle, a tickle in my throat, and blocked-up ears.”

All I wanted was a brand name, but the guy said, “I’ll be right with you.” He scampered out from behind his window and leered at me like a bouncer outside a strip-joint. I swear he was rubbing his hands. “How adventurous are you?” he asked.

I didn’t like this, not one bit, but the fellow was, after all, a drug dealer of sorts, and that brought machismo into play. “Very adventurous,” I said.

So he did a bit more scampering, over to a nearby shelf. “Ever tried homeopathy?” he asked.

That sounded like what Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy did. “Definitely not,” I said.

“Here.” He plopped a box in my hands that said “Oscillococcinum.” He himself said, “Oscillococcinum.” It wasn’t a pretty sound. I’d take Afrin, Advil, Sudafed, Actifed, whatever. I wasn’t going to take Oscillococcinum nohow.

“Um . . . oh, look here,” I said. “It reads ‘fever, chills, body aches.’ And since I don’t have fevers or — ”

“Here.” He handed me an almost-identical box that said “Coldcalm,” which was obviously just oscillococcinum without the fever medicine.

“If this is similar to Sudafed,” I said, “then maybe I’d be better off just getting the — ”

“Sudafed is shit!” he said indignantly. He clearly took me for an accomplice now and was oblivious to the other customers in the store. “It makes your heart race! It makes you nervous!”

“Doesn’t make me nervous,” I said.

“It ravages your body,” he said. “Homeopathic medicines rely on the body’s own defenses to defeat your cold naturally!”

The other customers were drifting out the door. He looked fiercely at me and began to explain that the rotten allopathic medicines, like penicillin and aspirin, relied on foreign bodies to attack germs. (“This turns your body into a . . . a battlefield,” he spluttered.) Homeopathic remedies used harmless trace amounts of noxious natural substances, mostly plants, to induce the body’s own defenses to kick in.

This led me to wonder why my cold itself wasn’t inducing the body’s defenses to kick in. “Is this from a reputable — ”

“It’s made in France! It’s the fruit of centuries of medical tradition — ”

(Like leeching, I thought.)

” — that avoids noxious chemicals and relies on the body’s own . . .”

Thirty seconds and ten dollars later I was out on the sidewalk with 30 pellets of Coldcalm. What a name! This, I thought, must be the medicinal equivalent of Celestial Seasonings tea, which, if you say to yourself “It’s tea, it’s tea, it’s tea” often enough, winds up tasting like tea. So I looked to see what was in it.

What a pleasant surprise. This was no placebo but an Elizabethan suicide kit! Coldcalm included belladonna, the aphrodisiac that medieval prostitutes used to dilate their pupils. There was nux vomica, nature’s most potent source of strychnine; gelsemium sempervirens; apis mellifica. One of these was described as a “deadly nightshade.” Granted, there was very little of each of them: only .5 X 10<12> mg of belladonna, for instance. Nonetheless, this looked like real medicine, so I launched into my druidic cure.

Alas, the following morning my cold was still very much with me and I was all out of pills. You’d think you’d get a lot of strychnine for ten bucks — at least a lethal dose! — but since the instructions called for 2 tablets every hour, I was going to have to shlep down to the drugstore and get a whole new box.

And then I decided that homeopathy didn’t make any sense to me, that it defeated the inner logic that had always allowed me to progress through a cold with optimism. I realized allopathic drugs were one of the pleasures of having colds as an adult — just as huge glasses of ginger ale and peanut- butter-toast-cut-infour-pieces and schooldays in bed watching “The Three Stooges” had been as a child. I liked feeling that help was on its way, that my body had allies that the virus hadn’t reckoned on when it came a-knockin’. I didn’t want to fake the cold out. Any pansy could do that. In my allopathic hubris, I wanted to defeat this cold, bloody it, rub its face in the dirt, and then taunt it.

So I went to my doctor. He prescribed an antibiotic. I asked if he could charge it to my prescription drug card.

“Sure,” he said. “You know the pharmacies hate those things. They’ve cut the profit margin on drugs to practically zero.”

“So they’re struggling, huh?”

“Naw. They’re steering people into other stuff where the profit margin is huge. . . . Ever heard of homeopathy?”

CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL