The Prescription Game

January 31 2017
Players: JA, LL, HT, PP
Ottawa

Description: Revolt can be invoked explicitly, as a revolutionary summoning. But it can also come about through “alternate” means, even something as banal as a form of alternative medicine. That “treatment” in the contemporary sense is a repressive apparatus goes without question, but how do we move beyond the useless tactics of amelioration and reform to an absolute divergence in the immediate, on medical grounds? The Prescription Game emerged from the joke question that was posed, “what meds is everybody on?” This led to discussions around the ineptitude of M.D.s and their reliance on quick-fixes, prescription pads, pathetic cures, and humdrum, time-saving solutions as opposed to the psychological and imaginative therapy of a common witch-doctor. What if the healer was fully committed to healing, and not subject to the pressures of the medical and pharmaceutical industry? We agreed that a “shamanic” solution to health is often more comforting and, despite the demons, closer to achieving human connection than contemporary treatments. Better yet, to try it out immediately. The game works as follows: an actual prescription-sized pad is produced. Each player contributed an ailment they are really suffering from, and then wrote a cure to one of their fellow player’s diseases, which was assigned by blind chance to an ailment. The result is a community of healing, attention and ritual enchantment. A happenstance revolt against the medical establishment, the dehumanizing current treatment of mental illness, and the concept of “health” in general.

The patients and doctors below are not identified either by their ailments (to avoid revealing patient information) or their prescriptions (to avoid accusations of malpractice).

Current Ailments:

1) Employment
2) Moving into a new place
3) Medical withdrawal / unidentified shoulder ailment
4) Brain fuzzies

Prescriptions:

1. The cure for employment: Inhaling a mouthful of bees and spitting them at a BULL!! while drenched in the blood of a magickal fox whose name is not known.

2. The cure for moving into a new place: Take 3 doses of powdered clown’s bone every thirty days. After the third dose, put on a rubber nose and honk whatever is nearest to you. All of your symptoms should be resolved. Side effects include: maniacal laughter and a French accent.

3. The cure for medical withdrawal / shoulder problems: Grow yourself a walnut tree. Consecrate it with your most drunken urine (lychee liquor recommended). Gather the walnuts. Find a Minister of Health to pelt with the nuts until one explodes and a foetus falls out. Make sure he’s forced to adopt it. If all else fails switch to coconuts dropped from orbit.

4. The cure for brain fuzzies: Trim the fingernails of your great-grandfather’s corpse. Boil them in an old horse skull with fish guts and dump into Prada handbag on the night of the new moon. Leave for one quarter turn of the moon. Make an effigy of your tormentor, paint the effigy with the mixture, and dance around it three times backwards while waving burning feathers. Set it all on fire. Set everything on fire. Run away screaming in glee.