The cure

What if scientists found the cure to obesity? But there’s a catch. You’d lose weight all right – almost all of it. You’d only be able to maintain a body weight that could, at a bare minimum, just nominally keep you alive. You’d look like you were starving. People would come up to you off the streets and be like, “Hey Mister, are you OK? Can I buy you a sandwich? Please?” And you’d feel fine, I mean, you’d feel as fine as somebody could who barely had anything protecting their insides other than a thin layer of skin. But would it be wroth it? Would you take that medication? I personally love free sandwiches, but I mean that’s still a pretty big decision to make.

Or what if this magical weight loss formula only worked depending on how much weight you currently carried? Like if you were three hundred pounds overweight, you’d go in for the treatment, and you’d come out looking way too skinny, like almost dead. But if you were only fifty pounds overweight, you’d only lose some of the weight, not all of it. And so people would try to find that sweet spot, that weird weight where, if you weighted exactly X amount of pounds, and went in for the surgery, you’d come out looking fine.

What if this stuff wasn’t just for obesity? What about depression? Would you rather be so morbidly depressed, unable to even get out of bed, ever, or would you rather my hypothetical cure? The cure would be that you’d constantly be so happy, that you’d be laughing uncontrollably, all the time. You wouldn’t be able to stop. Maybe if you tried really hard, like worked at holding in the laughter as hard as you could, you’d be able to pause it, but only for a second. Because as soon as you got yourself under control you’d remember something funny you read on some guy’s funny-business blog and you’d start laughing again.

Allergic to peanuts? That sucks. Peanuts are awesome. But you know what’s even worse? Being allergic to everything in the world except peanuts. Once I get rich I’m going to funnel trillions of dollars into a drug company to make a medication that does exactly that: cures people of their peanut allergies but makes it so they have to only eat peanuts for the rest of their life. And I’m serious with the “only peanuts” business. Like not even any salt. Just plain unsalted peanuts. And after a day I’d go visit the people who signed up for my drug trials and I’d lecture them, “Well, was it all worth it? Isn’t this what you’ve always wanted, to be able to eat peanuts?” And they’d cry and beg for the antidote, and I’d say, “You fools! There is no antidote! Bwahahah!” and they’d try cry and scream, but they wouldn’t be able to because, think about it, imagine that feeling you get after eating a whole spoonful of peanut butter. It’s like cement in your mouth. That’s what these people would be dealing with forever.

Hair loss is such a common problem among men. So common that you would have thought some genius pharmaceutical researcher ought to have come up with a solution by now. I think you can all guess where this one is headed: a topical solution that, when applied to the head, causes hair to fill in all the bald spots. But it doesn’t stop there. It fills in every single spot on your body where there isn’t any hair with thick, dark locks. It gets better. For all of the places where there was hair, those hairs fall off. So you just see these guys that look like giant apes, except for bald lines where their eyebrows were and weird hairless patches on the sides and back of their heads. The effect would be even more pronounced on guys who had hairy arms or hairy backs. They’d look like a bunch of freaks.

I could do this forever. Not sure about Viagra? I’ll invent a pill that’ll give men permanent erections. How about restless leg syndrome? My treatment gives a lasting rest to your poor legs, but the rest of your body starts gyrating uncontrollably. Guess what my insomnia pills do? They do the exact opposite of what my narcolepsy pills do. What about an osteoporosis procedure that makes your bones so healthy and so strong that you can’t even lift them, in fact, they’re so heavy they fall right out of your body as soon as the therapy is done? Maybe that last one was a little too much …

Strep throat sucks. It’s a good thing that I didn’t invent penicillin first, because if I did, it would cure your sore throat but give strep to everything else. Can you imagine how painful strep hand has to be? Or strep face?

Jesus, I can’t believe I got a whole blog post out of this. You’re welcome/I’m sorry.