Out of the Mouths Of Babes...

...or in this case, comedians.

Dennis Miller and George Carlin were on last night, and they both touched on something that got me to thinking.

Miller talked about these allergy drugs we have. He mentioned some of the side-effects of one of the more popular ones: bleeding, migraine, heart attack and stroke. "Damn," he said, "just gimme a Kleenex, will ya?"

And Carlin talked about our "sanitized" culture, making fun of how we're always spraying, wiping, boiling. He referred to his childhood, swimming in the rivers around NY City, how kids then didn't wash their hands 48 times a day. He said it helped build a rock-solid immune system in his body, and that he hadn't been sick in years.

Of course, it was all comedy, but sometimes comedy is funny because it's true. And sometimes "funny" makes you think.

I'm not as old as Carlin, but still, I wasn't a kid that long ago. I have 3 of my own now, and it seems like every kid they go to school with has asthma, or monstrous food allergies. I don't think I knew what asthma was until 8th grade. And I'm sure there were few, if any, kids in my school who were allergic to peanut butter. Where I grew up, parents had to beg kids to occasionally eat something other than PB&J sandwiches.

We've outsmarted Mother Nature a few times, polio, smallpox, plague, but it seems like we've only moved the battlefields. In this day and age, we're manic about sterilization, but it seems as though once a week, some food-borne illness knocks hundreds of people to the sidelines.

And Miller made a good point too. We're messing with our bodies. We swallow tons of pills that are capable of causing things 10 times worse than the ailment we set out to treat. We've definitely become a drug-culture of sorts. We can treat just about anything with a pill or two, and we're seemingly very comfortable with it all. "Meds" anyone? A cute nickname usually only gets tagged onto something we're ok with, no?

All these drugs make me nervous. We have depression medicines that carry the warning that some might experience increased propensity toward suicide. We pump kids full of drugs intended to control ADHD, ADD, and things like that, but have we fallen into a trap of, in some cases mind you, substituting chemical controls for parental control? I mean, even the anti-reflux drugs can cause problems, because we need stomach acids to absorb Vitamin B.

And while there was a lot of silliness associated with these comedians ranting on these things, I do wonder. Are we overdoing it? Have we eliminated so many germs and viruses that we have immune systems that might not be up to the job? Mother Nature, among other things, has always shown us that she never runs out of tricks. We hear a lot of warnings about that influenza strain that's threatening to mutate and potentially cause a pandemic. Are our bodies prepared for such a threat?

Whew. I'd better watch Discovery Channel tonight. This comedy stuff can kill me!