I have had the pleasure of being raised by a skeptical mother. Throughout my life, I have been told to question what I see on television and never believe what I read on the internet (so don’t trust or believe this post). Furthermore, it is important to acknowledge that being skeptical doesn’t mean you disregard everything that is around you. Being skeptical is questioning the asymmetrical knowledge that permeates all of our lives. To be a true skeptic, you should even question or validate your own knowledge on a regular basis (something most forget to do, including myself).
But with all this questioning, when will I have time to chow on some sausages? Simple, never, but I will give you a quick hint… it is possible to have time for fun without believing everything you see. If it sounds batshit crazy, odds are it is batshit crazy. If you are on a social media site and see something that is wholly unbelievable, don’t believe it (one because it is a social media site and getting you engaged pays their bills, and nothing will engage you more than: Garlicman appears and destroys Godzilla with breath attack). If you go to a blog that is promoting the healing powers of garlic and there are advertisements everywhere for GarlAxe (An axe made out of garlic that you can munch on) you are probably on a website that is promoting garlic to help sell more GarlAxes – they are either lying to you or inflating the results of studies on garlic. [more hidden, click “Read More” for super secret access]
So why my hate on garlic? Simple, someone on my feed asked for assistance in curing Strep Throat without using antibiotics. That’s great, I would love to use antibiotics less, because through their use, we are breeding a future of super bacteria and will eventually revert us, as a species, to the dark ages where a simple cut/infection could wipe out your entire family. The answer to curing the infection, in the blog post, was to eat garlic. That’s right, garlic. Now, I am no scientist, but I am Italian. Throughout highschool, I ate garlic at every dinner (and not that garbage that comes in a jar pre-minced soaking in oil, fresh crushed garlic… the good shit), and almost twice a year, I found myself in the doctor’s office getting tested for Strep Throat (huge surprise, I was always positive (even for such a negative person)).
Point being, raw garlic will not cure you of pathogens (my story isn’t what led to this conclusion, that is a fun anecdotle story I wanted to share because I don’t believe I need to spoon feed you research). Garlic will boost your immune system, do other great things, make your breath stink, lead to wildly uncontrollable farts, and of course (the most verifiable of the previous statements), taste delicious. But I highly suggest you don’t believe that something that we have been consuming for this long is capable of curing an infection that takes hardcore modern antibiotics to wipe out. And the blog you pulled that information for, they are making hundreds of thousands of dollars by sell you a placebo.
Strep Throat will clear up naturally, but it also can morph and become wildly dangerous for your health if left untreated. So please, listen to a doctor, and if you don’t believe him, ask another doctor. And please, it isn’t a conspiracy theory when the doctors say something doesn’t work, they are sharing their limited knowledge with you (but they are much better informed than a guy with a B.S. in Rhetoric, I am talking of course, about Dr. Garlic), but if you believe Dr. Garlic’s fantastical blog on otherworldly medicine then you could be a lost cause already. In the end, if you believe garlic is a antibiotic, you probably won’t be killed by the super bug that I am afraid of, rather, it will just be some simple bug we have had around our species for the last 2,000 years, like syphilis.
*Any likeness to GarlAxe, GarlicMan, or Dr. Garlic are a pure coincidence