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           There was this joke I used to remember during my childhood when I happen to have a toothache that I cried for it. My mother was irritated that she told me she will strike my toenail with a hammer so I could forget the pain of my aching tooth. She was just trying to scare me of course, but in the real life this scenario tends to be applicable in most of our everyday dealings.

           In medicine, there are countless issues of simple symptoms that trigger a major illness when the medication prescribed by the doctor tend to address the problem for awhile but resulted to a host of more complex body malfunctions. When I was a child, I had this recurring problem of runny nose where I was compelled to take so many cold tablets just to keep me attend school. I suppose such dependency on cold tablets for quite a time had a side-effect that I began to develop high blood pressure as an adult. This similar situation replicates itself in the way most medicines were designed to affect us. In treating hypertension for example, long time use of anti-hypertensive drugs could result to damaged kidneys and other complications.

          Recalling my childhood recollection of my mother’s idea of hammering my toenail as a cure to my toothache, I’m amazed that our present society and the whole world got us into this global economic downturn in the same approach for a remedy. Everything is just worth an option for a peaceful talk to attain world peace. Yet this talk had been taken for granted in favor of each side’s concept of a remedy. One side thought that terrorism could be a fitting recourse in the name of religious ideology. The other side adopts the advances of science and technology to stockpile weapons of mass destruction in retaliation to the act of terrorism. The rest is history and our governments had been spending too much on firepower and just a fraction on our basic life’s necessities. We are metaphorically aboard this one ship sailing through life and it takes just one push of a button to initiate a nuclear detonation to bore a big hole at the hull of our boat. If our world leaders could become so frantic, we may not actually die at the hands of terrorists but we will eventually drown in an ocean of insecurity and self-distrust.

         I could always favor the death of my toenail for saving my tooth; I guess that is just the way it is. The pains of life have to be felt every now and then.

Other Posts on Life Philosophy:

Ego

The Institution

The Wheel of Life