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I think I’ll abstain from too much comment on this one. The many-headed hydra. The subject we’re all superstitious about. There’s a gruesome condition mentioned on this square that I would prefer not to think about at the moment.

Seemingly miraculous new cures do emerge, for which we’re profoundly thankful when they affect our nearest and dearest. But it’s always at a cost. One man’s funded treatment is another’s post-code lottery. Drugs are big business and tradeable commodities.

Develop one new treatment and a drug-resistant strain emerges. Generic drugs can’t be provided to third-world countries because patents are still operative and the named drugs are too expensive.

Colloidal silver, a promising line of treatment abandoned when antibiotics became big business (in the 1960s? I’m ignorant!) , is back on the scene. Tim is having his surgical wound from the screws put in his broken ankle painted with a silver lollipop. This pleases me, although no doubt silver’s been patented too. Perhaps we’ll all soon be aspiring to drink gold (aurum potabile) as the universal cure, like they did in the Middle Ages. But of course the recession has sent gold prices soaring….