Better living through chemistry

Woke up with a sore throat today. Ate some ibuprofen and pseudoephedrine for breakfast, went to a drugstore, bought some Kestine and ate a pill of that too.

I don't normally have any problem taking medications for various acute conditions, but when I have to take some allergy medication throughout the allergy season some little Russian wakes up in me and bothers me, and I have to remind myself that my doctor told me that, with the exception of possible strong side effects, it's a lot safer for me to take allergy medication every time I feel in need of it than to just let the allergy symptoms be.

That's mostly a Russian thing, although I see some people in the West have this problem too. Russians, in their own weird way, like all things "natural" and tend to forget that when everything was "natural" human life tended to be rather painful and short. When Russians disapprove of some medication, or some insufficiently natural food, they (many of them, anyway) say "it's all chemistry!" or "it's full of chemistry!", and that incudes even the kind of people who enjoy a drop or two of lysergic acid diethylamide every morning.

That, BTW, is probably one of the main reasons why there are so many abortions in Russia. The birth control pill is "full of chemistry", you see, and therefore unsafe to consume on a daily basis. The same people who first told me that had no problem whatsoever eating the pills when their period was late. Then they took the whole month's set at a time. Usually worked, too.