As a physician and subscriber to the biweekly humor newspaper Funny Times which I consider the printed equivalent of Jon Daily’s old The Daily Show, MY wacky insuppressible sense of humor,could not pass on this blog article in the blog I follow, Quickfire. entitled NORTH KOREA SAYS IT HAS ‘CURE’ for MERS, EBOLA, AIDS. [Here is the link if you have to paste it into your browser URL address window: http://tinyurl.com/na49dzh ].

Although I am psychiatrist who started literally in neurosciences, operating on brains of mammals, helping in the labs that initially tested LSD and discovered the “pleasure center” as it was called in those early days, I have had several other long abiding medical subspecialty areas of interest. Neurosciences and infectious diseases being two of them

So when this article popped up on one of my trusty Googlebot search alerts for these terms, I was immediately intrigued. The post must be seen. I have included one of the more ludicrous pictures here.

My thought when I first glanced upon this was, “How terrifying would that be to me to have those guys as my rounding attendings and residents, interns, and medical students each morning?” I also riffed uncontrollably in Kurt Vonnegut like wild associations such as, “If you give the wrong symptom, the guys in the Generals’ hats whip out their Russian Makarov pistols and kill you on the spot?” Or maybe if you happen to cough on the Supreme Leader by mistake…

One of the questions that occurred to me was based on the premise that there is NO FRIGGIN’ WAY the North Koreans could have come up with any medical advance that does not involve torture. I am not a reader of the North Korean Journal of Medicine (their counterpart to our esteemed New England Journal of Medicine), but my dear and ever efficient search bots keyed to AIDS or HIV have not turned up any recent links to articles and breakthroughs in the North Korean medical literature.

Why would the NK’s (short for North Koreans, might as well use an acronym as I sort of detest giving them even the recognition of typing the name and if I came up with my own typed sarcastic name for that despotic blight on the earth, would likely get me killed “rubbed out.’ I think things are so crazy in NK that now their propaganda offensive has to start claiming humanitarian elements of the regime. They certainly have had years of bad PR and press and most of it true and deserved from what little I know. Three generations of families of political dissidents are imprisoned to atone for the crime of say, the grandfather, two generations before. BAAADDDD Berries if I ever saw it.

So what better way than to claim medical breakthroughs cures for AIDS/HIV, MERS, , EBOLA that make the Karolinska Institute, Duke, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, The Maudesley Hospital, Stanford, Michigan, Baylor,  UCLA, and Mayo, all look like slaggards and slackers. It’s a pity they left out the common cold and athlete’s foot.

My own suppositions are that their “cures” are based on the following premises:

• total denial; these disorders do not exist
• paranoid projection onto the West; us evil scientists in the West conjured up these maladies as scare tactics
• worst still, the evil Western world of science intentionally invented these dread diseases and sent infected agents into NK to spread these maladies
• these disorders do exist in NK and have been eradicated by putting all patients with these conditions into the lifelong gulags.