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with
sympathy.”
    “ They didn’t appear to
believe there was a near accident at the intersection, or even a
click-clack?”
    “ No. They have become
convinced all of it was a my imagination. It transpires that,
following my first discussion with them on the preceding Wednesday,
they looked for me in their computer, and knew already that I had
been in their jails.”
    “ Jails? You’ve been
arrested?”
    “ Si—yes, sure. Twice, both
times resulting from malicious charges and lies concocted by my
enemies, in hope of ruining me. But they, Murphy and Devincent,
also knew of the other unpleasant incidents of notoriety, or some
of them.”
    “ Others?” I was starting to
become uneasy. “Incidents of notoriety? Some?”
    “ It is difficult to explain
to a layman. Please, take no offense, many doctors consider this
word—layman—a purposeful insult, a knockdown, description of a mere
mortal, but with me it is a compliment, mainly. What for my
purposes I must gradually acquaint you with are matters fully
comprehensible only to other physicians who are not orthodox
physicians, not allopathic doctors.”
    Maybe because I was
already a little uneasy, something in what he’d just said struck
me. It was that, “What for my purposes I must gradually acquaint
you with....” What purposes? And why “gradually”? But I already had
plenty of other questions, so I merely commented, “I hate to get
into this, I think. But you’ve said ‘allopathic’ several times now,
and I’m not sure I know what it means. It sounds like some kind of
disease.”
    “ It is. It is what everyone
automatically thinks of when somebody says ‘doctor,’ or
‘physician,’ or ’medicine,’ or ‘M.D.,’ or ‘health care’ and so
forth, because it—allopathy—is the only official medicine we have
here in the United States, the so-called legitimate medicine. It is
what nearly everyone believes is the only kind of real doctor there
is, although there are many, many other kinds of doctors and
healers—like me, for example. But they believe this because
allopathy is ninety-nine percent of what we are allowed, what is
‘authorized and approved’ for medical treatment in these United
States of ours, which also—most importantly—means this official
authorized-and-approved stupidness becomes ninety-nine percent of
what we hear or read or are told by talking dummies on
television.”
    Hank leaned forward,
placing his clasped hands atop the desk, and fixed his bright
almost-burning eyes on me. “Allopathy, or conventional medicine, is
a therapeutic system based on the bassackward belief that
expressions of so-called disease must be treated by different or
unlike expressions—which, incidental but important, is the exact
opposite of my homeopathy, which embraces the truism similia
similibus curantur, or like cures like. Essentially, aside from the
wonderful technical skills of trauma surgeons or surgery to repair
or remove malfunctioning or injured body parts or tissues—not so
wonderful if those body pieces are okay or repairable without
irreversible operations, which most of the time they are—allopathy
embraces the continuing use of unnatural chemical compounds alien
to the body’s constitution, thousands of synthetic drugs and pills
and shots and serums, to treat symptoms of bodily disease or
disorder. In practice, it is the upside-down medical philosophy
that disease must be attacked by its opposite expression, that
disease symptoms must be fought, warred upon, suppressed at all
costs.”
    “ So? What’s wrong with
that?”
    I had, apparently, not
asked a wonderful question. He scowled hugely, pulling his lips
sideways, and appearing to clamp his teeth tightly together. But
then he smoothed his features, forcibly it seemed to me, and said
slowly, much more slowly than before, as though to be sure I didn’t
miss anything, “Perhaps you were not listening cleverly. I am
explaining that allopathy is a crazy upside-down as