Altmed

One of the many aspects of quack medicine that I find incomprehensible is the sheer persistence and tenacity of patently absurd beliefs and practices. No matter how implausible the theory it still gets churned out as pseudoscience. And it does not matter how much evidence demolishes these beliefs, the proponents get more and more entrenched.

I am constantly bemused that practices such as homeopathy, reiki, chiropracty and all the other weird and ludicrous practices can just keep going, in the face of logic and reason. It is enough to make you despair of humanity.

In fact there is hope. If you look back you can find other quack practices which have died out completely, where people have come to their senses and recognised the nonsense for what it is. 

One such is this one. Like other quack practices it has a philosophy claiming that all disease is due to one specific cause, rather like chiropractic subluxations, only in this case it is asserted that all your ills are due to a tight arsehole. 

The logical treatment therefore is anal dilatation, using some of these.

Absurd, but no more so than the altmed practices prevalent today. 

I can envisage the exchange between a practitioner of this technique and one of his uncured and disappointed patients. “Dr Quack, those dilators you gave me did me no good at all. For all the good they did I might as well have shoved ‘em up my arse.”