Oh No! Not Vick's Vapo-Rub Now!

These days one reads the constant flow of articles on new medical findings only at great peril to what one all along saw as being the Great Truths, especially if one thinks he has longstanding evidence to support those truths.

Now they're saying that Vick's Vapo-Rub actually not only has no medicinal value, but also it is dangerous to infants and young children, because it inflames their airways.

It has been many months since I've been an infant, but for decades now Vick's Vapo-Rub has been my handy-dandy all-purpose remedy of choice, especially in the Winter, the Season of Sore Throats, and I have energetically said so. Though I had more or less forgotten about it in recent years and now I don't think I even have any, I usually took it by rubbing it under my nose so as to breathe in the menthol or by rubbing it on my throat thinking its benefits could be absorbed that way, but in my earlier days I would try to get closer to the trouble by actually swallowing a little of it. (Could that have been the cause, in the last eight years, of things blocking the way now and then as if caught on a shelf near the top of my throat and refusing to move on for hours at a time, and once for a couple of days?) That was before some time passed without doing that, and then I discovered that my palate had changed and the stuff had lost all of its already limited tastiness. But whatever the method of taking it, Vicks usually worked for me. Psychosomatic?

So why did "they" have to wait so long to tell us this? And I mean it has been a very long time.

Here is another definition of age: it's listening to people sawing away at the tried and true credos that have always been the posts holding up the house in which not so much your body as your mind has for so long a time dwelled so comfortably.