“What if I told you alternative medicine really doesn’t deliver the kind of health benefits it claims? That beyond providing a placebo effect, it doesn’t do much at all. You know what the placebo effect is, don’t you?”

“Yeah, that’s when you take some kind of medicine, like a sugar pill, that actually has no medicine in it, but you feel better.”

“Exactly. So, to reword what I’m saying, what if I told you alternative medicine doesn’t do anything other than provide a placebo effect, but in the process puts you at risk?”

Lou laughed. “Maybe I’ll just go out and buy me a bottle of sugar pills.”

“Lou, I’m being serious about this. I want to understand why you won’t question the rationale of going to a supposed health provider, paying good money, possibly putting yourself at risk of death, when I’m telling you all you’re getting is a placebo effect. Help me understand.”

“Maybe it’s because I can go and see this chiropractor guy.”

“I still don’t understand. What do you mean you go because you can go?”

“It’s harder than hell to get in to see my general practitioner. His office is like a fort with a couple of witches who act like they need to protect him from me, the grunt. And when I do get in to see him, he tells me to lose weight and stop smoking, as if that’s easy, and I’m in and out so fast that half the time I forget why I went in to see him in the first place. Then I call up the chiropractor, they take your call right away and are pleasant. If you want to speak to the chiropractor, you can. If it’s an emergency and you want to come in right away, you can. And when you do get into the office, there’s not the hour-long wait, and when you see the therapist, you don’t have the feeling he’s rushing you through an assembly line like a hunk of meat at a slaughterhouse.”

For a few moments there was a silence. As a benefit of controlling his own emotion to a reasonable degree, Jack could hear Lou’s breathing. The man was mildly vexed. Jack cleared his throat. “Thank you!” he said. “You’ve taught me something I needed to know.”

“You’re welcome,” Lou said with little sincerity.

“I said I have been looking into alternative medicine, and I’ve been mystified by the general public’s willingness to embrace it despite the fact it appears to me to be nearly worthless efficacy-wise, yet it costs the public billions upon billions of dollars a year. Herbal medicine alone, I found out, rakes in some thirty billion, which reminds me, do you take any herbal medicine?”