I commend to you the website of Mr Andy Kadir-Buxton. Mr K.B. deserves our deepest respect, since he desires nothing more than to make the world a better place and happily, he has found ways of doing so that are simple, low-tech and laughably cheap. For example, consider how mental health problems have burdened mankind over the centuries, and how amulets, herbs, exorcisms, dark houses and whips have failed to alleviate suffering. Consider the time and money required by modern treatments: we manufacture drugs, train psychotherapists and build institutions that we must staff with vast numbers of professionals from a wide variety of fields. Andy shows us how we can do away with all this expense. His method for re-setting a mind gone wonky is simplicity itself:

The Kadir-Buxton Method is done by making a fist of both hands, and striking both ears of the patient at exactly the same time and pressure with the soft part of the inner hand which is where the thumb joins the hand.

It will readily be apparent that the technique derives from a similar method for rectifying such faults as shadows, scrolling pictures and snowstorms on tellies in the days when they had valves. Of the many advantages of this technique, ease of acquisition is by no means the least. Curing insanity could soon become a side-line for social workers, teachers, milk men and lollipop ladies. The method should not be confused with simply smacking somebody upside the head, however, and must be sensitively applied:
With the Kadir-Buxton Method, a patient standing on one leg whilst holding a rose would still be standing on one leg and holding a rose when they were cured. With a punch, the patient would be lying prone on the floor, and could well have dropped the rose. And just to add insult to injury, they would still be mentally ill. Try it for yourselves if you do not believe me.

I have not been able to verify Mr K.B.'s findings independently, partly due to the price of roses out of season, but chiefly because of ethical considerations. Could any insane person of my acquaintance actually give informed consent to being slapped about like this? Also, I am very hazy about such stuff as double-blind trials and placebos and what-not. Wouldn't you have to have a control group of crazy volunteers that did not get slapped or hold roses? Or maybe hold tulips and get kicked in the groin? There'd be all those flowers and body parts to go into. Still, I'm sure that like homeopathy, it must work and we needn't bother trying to prove it.

Clive Holmes is Professor of Biological Psychiatry in the division of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Southampton and Andy has been following his research into Alzheimer's. Professor Holmes says of the disease: "With Alzheimer's, the damage to the brain happens gradually over a period of years. The best thing you could normally hope for with any treatment is to keep things where they are. The underlying structure - of dead brain cells - will still be there." Andy, ever confident and optimistic, claims that repeated applications of his method, plus teaching the patient logic, would reverse all effects of dementia. I would like to see this in action, I must say. Lessons on set theory and arithmetical hierarchy delivered to people whose brains are slowly rotting, punctuated by repeated thwacks to the ears, would seem prima facie more, rather than less, likely to cause confusion than measured doses of Aricept and as much TLC as you can give. Again, we await clinical trials.

Andy turns now to that perennial headache, raising the dead. 'First, it must be ascertained that the heart of the patient has stopped beating.' Sensible advice, that. Once you are sure this is the case,

'...the edge of the shoed, or bare, foot must be brought down hard on the chest just above the heart. (Ribs can be broken with this method) The pain is so intense that it reaches parts of the brain which have not fully shut down, and this revives the patient.'

Once you've smashed his ribs in, 'the patient should be taken to hospital as soon as possible as there is a reason for them dying in the first place, which should be treated.' Just hope the shattered sternum is treatable too, or the ex-corpse might be less than grateful for your intervention.

Andy is as good on wimmins' trubble as he is on every other ailment. He is able to reach his hand right into the womb to free blocked-up fallopian tubes. I don't know how he does this, but he says he 's been meddling with female parts since he was a small boy. Think of all those women, and the memories they must caress. What causes these fallopian blockages? You'd be surprised:

Polyps are the sides of the fallopian tubes expanding outwards because of the pressure from the blockage, or foreign objects such as ball bearings and even pen tops. The blockage has to be squeezed out a millimeter at a time... All blockages that I have found have been dead bacteria, or sometimes lemonade which is a result of a country-wide practice of lesbians at Universities.

You can avoid the risks involved in shoving bottles of pop up your crack by gaining an orgasmic nose:

The conditioning needed in order to get an orgasmic nose are both 'Hands Free' masturbation until orgasm, (the tightening and relaxing of vaginal muscles for five minutes until vaginal orgasm occurs) and also to then stroke the nose while having the orgasm.

On the Pavlovian principle of second-order conditioning, with time, touching the nose will automatically trigger orgasm. 'The common cold could become fun', Andy says.

It would be easy, all too easy, simplicity itself, actually, to dismiss Mr Kadir-Buxton as a cheerful whack-job, away with the fairies, lost to reason, long since withdrawn into the back-arse of bat-shittery. This would be to wrong him, as he is at pains to point out that he is a great believer in logic, as may be deduced from a close reading of the foregoing. 'I always tell people that the best way of learning logic is to study and analyse the character of Mr Spock in 'Star Trek.'' And as all philosophy is but a footnote to Spock, Andy suggests that 'further studies can be of Ancient Greeks, such as Plato.'

When he isn't studying Spockean logic, Andy likes a good giggle: 'some laughter therapists have found that just making the noise of laughter without finding anything funny to laugh at is enough to improve health.' If you cannot find anything funny but need a boost to your immune system, try putting wine into a soda stream and then drinking the fizz through a straw, a practice Andy reckons has traditionally been seen as inadvisable:

I decided that I would try both at the same time to see what happened. Wine was put into the Soda Stream, which then added CO2. When drunk through a straw hysterical laughter ensue (sic) and when the laughter subsides you feel much better than you did before you started.

Another way to split your sides in the absence of anything really funny is to blow a lungful of cigarette smoke into a party balloon, and then hyperventilate on the smoke. 'Again laughter ensues and you feel much better for the experience.' It is perfectly legal at present to provoke mirth by both these methods, but we must be vigilant, because as Andy warns us:

'I have had balloons confiscated by the British police on several occasions.'

So there you have it. The key to the good life is to drink fizzy wine through a straw and fill balloons with cigarette smoke while you ponder the words and deeds of Mr Spock. If you have a partner who is prepared to thump you regularly on the temples and primed to kick your ribs in should you expire, so much the better. We need no longer fear old age, infirmity and dementia, and it's all so cheap and simple.

*****

I live here