The following is an exclusive excerpt from podcast king Adam Carolla’s upcoming book President Me: The America That’s in My Head, in stores today:
CHAPTER 7 – THE DEPT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES: Celebrities and Alternative Medicine:
We used to trust doctors. We knew they had more education and experience than us. In today’s narcissistic culture we treat medicine as a matter of personal opinion. That’s what I love about carpentry: I get to be an expert. I can tell you the nailing schedule on shear wall, that if you have exterior hinges they have to be NRP (nonremovable pins), and no one is going to question me. Now everyone has shitty medical information from the Internet, celebrities, and their life coaches. They turn to people who failed out of junior college to tell them they can cure their cancer with purified water and good vibes. Oh, and if they align their chakras. For those of you who don’t know, chakras are those things that don’t exist that chicks with too much time and too little IQ believe are in their body, even though you can’t find them on an MRI. Disturbances in these chakras cause every physical, mental, and even financial ailment known to man. So if you have anything wrong–from a headache to getting laid off–it’s time to talk to someone who specializes in fixing your chakras. And guess what? These spiritual healers always find a problem. Something is wrong with your root chakra and God forbid something happens to your crown chakra. That’s really going to fuck up your third eye. It’s like going in for a free brake inspection. They’re going to find a problem. Just like Manny Moe and Jack with the brake pads, these shaman sham artists are never going say that you’re completely in alignment and clear. Nope, you’re gonna need some healing stones and white sage smoke to the tune of eighty dollars an hour. Of course it’s all a big fat placebo disguised as the wisdom of the East.
What happened? Doctors used to be doctors. In the Old West the entire area would have one doctor that everyone trusted to fix what ailed you with a little whiskey and surgery on a kitchen table. It wasn’t like some hippie would show up and say, “Hold on. I have a friend in Dodge City whose aunt was cured by an Oriental who burned a cat whisker.”
The worst offenders when it comes to this bullshit are celebrities. When they’re not pretending to be climatologists, they have a lot of thoughts on “Western medicine” or, as I like to call it, medicine.
The worst of the worst is Jenny McCarthy and her crusade against vaccines. I feel bad that her kid has autism but her quest is a dangerous mix of denial, self-entitlement, and having a megaphone. She can’t handle the idea that some random piece of shitty fate struck her. Not her! That’s for poor people in another part of the world. There must be an answer! A cause. So she hops on the Internet, finds some bullshit, spouts it as fact, and convinces a large segment of mothers–mostly fellow paranoid white ones with too much money and not enough problems–that vaccinations cause autism. Meanwhile a generation of kids will get tuberculosis, measles, meningitis, etc.
Why did anyone listen to her? She won Playmate of the Year, not a Nobel Prize. Could you get any farther away from a lab than the Playboy Mansion? I don’t think there’s a ton of Bunsen burners in there and it’s certainly not sterile. Unless you’re researching syphilis, the Grotto is not exactly the lab at Pfizer.
Speaking of, let me do a quick tangent on Jenny McCarthy in Playboy. She posed in that again a couple of years ago and everyone was like “She still looks good at forty.” Sure. But we were first introduced to her in Playboy when she was nineteen. We still have those pictures. We don’t need to see her at forty. If she were an astronaut, race-car driver, or Senator McCarthy, that’d be one thing; there’d be a novelty to seeing her at forty. But the whole reason we know she exists is because we saw her naked. Do we need to see her now that she has barnacles? No guy looks at a hot nineteen-year-old and thinks, “Man, I can’t wait to see her when she’s forty.” Did we run out of nude twenty-one-year-olds?
Carolla’s President Me hits book stores May 13, 2014.
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