Sheep Dung’s Better Than The Alternative

My mom has well over a dozen cousins and keeps in contact with them more or less regularly, with one exception. This exception looks somewhat like Catweazle and is a CAM practitioner — Complementary and Alternative Medicine — selling all kinds of diagnostics and treatments that have no scientific foundation whatsoever and that he partially made up himself. In other words, he’s a quack.

He’s infamous throughout the family for breaking ties with his own sister when she refused to take his herbs instead of a proper treatment of her breast cancer. Now, however, the health scare seems to lead some family members to forget about that. This is a message my mom got from one of her — usually reasonable — cousins:

Cousin: “As you know from the media, the Corona can cause pneumonia. Well, I remembered something my cousin told me once! He said that sheep’s urine has healing properties for the lungs. So, I called him and he confirmed my theory! According to him, to prevent infection, you should cook milk with sheep’s dung and drink a cup of it in the morning! It works both as prophylaxis and as treatment.”

Some other family members got this message from her, as well. I don’t even have words for how shocked and disgusted I am.

Dear everyone: please stay sane and stay healthy. Keep social contacts to a minimum, and listen to your doctors and common sense.