I saw this article in the NYT the other day.
I'm not sure who came up with the idea of the Neti Pot, or if it was was taken from a Dick Cheney Water Boarding torture manual, but - the truly surprising thing is - it's actually quite reasonably widely practiced around here. Euphemistically, it's also called "Nasal Irrigation".
It freaked me out a little bit. The picture accompanying the article was not produced by a surrealist disciple of Salvador Dali, the videos on youtube prove that it is physically possible though the following might give you nightmares for a few weeks.
The videos on youtube make it appear suprisingly simple to recline your head a fraction a tiny bit and pour a mini teapot full of water up one nostril and down the other nostril. The translucent liquid swishing back out of the exit nasal passage looks implausibly bogey-free to me. Unlikely also seems to be the absence of choking induced by the manouvere.
The standard deal I thought city-dwellers (at least in MEDCs) make, before they retreat to the suburbs middle-aged, is that they trade off a few years of life by moving to an unhealthy polluted city, where they can play sport or go hiking so that they can pack more life in to the years that they have. Not so in New York: they are constantly trying to appear younger and healthier, fighting the inevitability of urbania with quackery, Gym Membership, vitamin supplements, soya milk and plastic surgery. Macrobioticism (something I initially assumed has a specific scientific name, really is the far more pretentious "long life")though has much to be commended for it. The fact is, it shows the kind of zest that New Yorkers have to fit more in to life, by extending it. Despite the Dorian Gray-esque aspirations, the aim is - essentially - a good one!
I'm not sure who came up with the idea of the Neti Pot, or if it was was taken from a Dick Cheney Water Boarding torture manual, but - the truly surprising thing is - it's actually quite reasonably widely practiced around here. Euphemistically, it's also called "Nasal Irrigation".
It freaked me out a little bit. The picture accompanying the article was not produced by a surrealist disciple of Salvador Dali, the videos on youtube prove that it is physically possible though the following might give you nightmares for a few weeks.
The videos on youtube make it appear suprisingly simple to recline your head a fraction a tiny bit and pour a mini teapot full of water up one nostril and down the other nostril. The translucent liquid swishing back out of the exit nasal passage looks implausibly bogey-free to me. Unlikely also seems to be the absence of choking induced by the manouvere.
The standard deal I thought city-dwellers (at least in MEDCs) make, before they retreat to the suburbs middle-aged, is that they trade off a few years of life by moving to an unhealthy polluted city, where they can play sport or go hiking so that they can pack more life in to the years that they have. Not so in New York: they are constantly trying to appear younger and healthier, fighting the inevitability of urbania with quackery, Gym Membership, vitamin supplements, soya milk and plastic surgery. Macrobioticism (something I initially assumed has a specific scientific name, really is the far more pretentious "long life")though has much to be commended for it. The fact is, it shows the kind of zest that New Yorkers have to fit more in to life, by extending it. Despite the Dorian Gray-esque aspirations, the aim is - essentially - a good one!
No comments:
Post a Comment