I’m an idiot.

I regularly rail on people for not being the slightest bit skeptical about “alternative medicines.” They tell me how much they love their echinacea, ginkgo, ginseng, dogroot, lizard bladder, rhino horn, powdered tiger penis, fairy dust, etc., and I tell them that I think they’re stupid, ignorant, foolish, unwise, irrational, and superdumb.

Of course, when nobody’s looking, I go out and buy myself a small selection of various supplements. I justify the behavior by the fact that I’ve at least done some research on this crap. Whether it’s an FDA approved drug or an “all natural” liver-dissolving extract being hunted by the FDA, I check it out before it goes in my body. If it melts my kidneys without curing my acne, then I don’t want to have anything to do with it.

One of the things I pick up, and about which I’ve previously written, is fish oil. I get it because publications, legitimate and otherwise, have been talking about all the fantastic possibilities about packaging icthyologous slick in pills and swallowing it.

The pills I buy are the ones endorsed by Dr. Andrew Weil. I don’t know a thing about him except that he likes to have facial hair, has the letters “M.D.” after his name, and is well liked by my paternal grandmother. I chose his pills because they were the most expensive on the shelf, and I figure that puts him and his company in good shape if I ever have to sue anybody for millions of dollars because my legs fall off after ingesting the stuff.

On the bottle, just up and to the left of the good doctor’s proud visage, is a paragraph which talks about why Dr. Weil’s fish squeezings are so much better than everybody else’s.

Here’s my favorite part of that paragraph:

Weil Omega-3 Complex is derived from molecularly distilled fish oil that is independently tested for heavy metals (mercury and lead) and other contaminants (including PCBs).

While my first reaction is to stop and scratch my head about just what the bloody hell “molecularly distilled fish oil” is supposed to be, the real meat of the statement is that the oil is “independently tested.”

Can anybody guess what’s missing here?

How about what’s done with those test results?

Nowhere on the bottle does it specify whether the results come back positive or negative – simply that the oil is tested. For all I know, these things should be called “Weil Omega-3 and Shitload of Lead Complex.”

We live in dark times, my friends.

Dark times…