by LAURIE NEIDERGAARDEN, Alternate Reality News Service Medical Writer
Cancer is the worst.
“Cancer is an absolute bastard,” stated Doctor Ferd “Batting” Mercator, head of Somatic Psychiatry at the Pasteur Institute of Advanced Dairy Studies. “You simply cannot negotiate with it. The only thing a cancer cell can think of is reproducing – they’re the horny teenage boys of the disease world! And, no matter how often you explain to them that that kind of reckless behaviour will kill the organism on which they depend for their survival, they refuse to listen. After all, cancer cells will be cancer cells!”
Somatic psychiatry is a new medical practice that became possible when everything in the universe – from the smallest atom to Bill O’Reilly – became sentient. “The discipline is so new, it squeaks!” Doctor Mercator interjected.
Yes. Well. Once diseases became self-aware, doctors realized that they could negotiate with them to improve the health of patients. “Somatic psychiatry is part Freud, part hostage negotiations,” Mercator, a pioneer in the field – and, a highly annoying one at that – interrupted again.
Seeing that most cancers were so obstinate, doctors searched for another level on which to negotiate. Individual atoms were of no help; having an almost Zen-like devotion to change, they were indifferent to whether they belonged to a healthy or a cancerous cell.
According to Doctor Maureen McMunchkid, a different, more cooperative pioneer in the field, a breakthrough came when her team attempted to negotiate with healthy cells around the cancer. If a doctor can convince a majority of them that it is not in their interests to metastasize the illness, she can limit its damage.
“It’s not so much a hostage negotiation,” Doctor McMunchkid explained, “as it is a union membership drive!”
Finding success for her method in clinical trials, Doctor McMunchkid has gone one step further in treating cancer: convincing healthy cells to reject the cancerous cells from the body.
“We’ve had mixed success with this technique,” Doctor McMunchkid admitted. “It really depends upon whether the healthy cells enjoy being part of the body they make up or not, and we have few psychological theories to guide us in this area. However, when it does work, it’s a thing to behold. It’s like a combination of…of Jung and a police convoy escorting a dangerous prisoner to state lines!”
The obvious advantage to this approach is that the cancer can be removed from the body without the need for icky invasive surgery. Doctor McMunchkid has argued that hospitals that adopted this medical technique could save millions of dollars in operating room scrubs alone.
Although cancer is the highest profile line of research in somatic psychiatry, it is by no means the only one. Doctor Arthur Ichibana, of the Conrad Zeitgeist Medical Institute and Petting Zoo, has had some success convincing cirrhotic livers to reject alcohol.
“You would think we would get some attention in the press,” Doctor Ichibana bitterly commented. “At the very least, you would think alcohol distillers would be interested in our research. But, noooooooooooooo. If it isn’t cancer, nobody wants to hear about it! I need a drink…!”
As California Doctor Sean McNamara pointed out, somatic psychiatry could also have important applications for reconstructive surgeons. “Imagine getting somebody whose face had been smashed in in a car accident and talking the bones into going back to their original shape – I get goose pimples just thinking about it!”
“Of course, we’ll probably just use the techniques to talk women’s breasts into enlarging or fat to leave people’s bodies of its own accord,” Doctor McNamara added with a shrug. “We can never leave well enough alone with these things!”
In fact, some private clinics are already using somatic psychiatry to help people, mostly women, lose weight. Unfortunately, these clinics are largely unregulated, and critics have argued that the largely unproven techniques can have harmful effects. There have already been several cases in which women died because once the process of migrating fat out of their body had started, it went out of control, causing them to lose too much of the stuff to remain healthy.
“You see,” Doctor McNamara redundantly commented.
“We mustn’t let the charlatans and those who prey on the weak make us lose sight of the fact that this is a tremendous breakthrough,” Doctor Mercator interrupted. We were about to object, when we realized that what he said actually made sense, and allowed him to have the last word.