Good morning. I have the medical reports requested for your NFL Draft preparation; my only caveat is that you don’t ask how I managed to acquire this information. Remember: cash remains king, and silence says just as much as your Tweets. What I can tell you is this: I think your team should be going heavy on the running backs this year. I don’t want to violate HIPAA, but I have it on good authority that your team’s running back’s ankle has essentially turned to scar tissue, dust, and radioactive goo. You’ll probably get 4-5 games out of him tops this year. Best to have someone waiting in the wings, ready to take that starter’s job and run with it for all it’s worth until a late, dirty hit similarly devastates his body and your front office is back to step 1 all over again. That said: considering every RB is going to be facing some notable arthritis issues in the decades following their retirement, I have a new treatment suggestion for you to consider. Here’s a pamphlet with more.

REINVENTING JONAH: HOW WHALE BATHING CAN CURE YOUR RHEUMATISM

What are the positives of this treatment?

Whales are truly fascinating animals. As the largest mammals on earth, their size has inspired awe in humans since time immemorial. How could you not find an animal the size of a house to be an incredible? Whales have been revered in many cultures for thousands of years, though particularly by the Norse, Japanese, and Arctic Indigenous peoples. The death of a whale still continues to bring significant crowds to beaches worldwide – if it’s a blue whale, they can be up to 100 feet long and weigh over 200 tons – that’s as much as fifteen school buses combined.

The beaching of a whale is a rare and special event – many people will live their entire lives without ever getting the chance to see one, alive or dead. However, in Australia at the beginning of the 20th century, one such beached whale inspired a highly novel medical treatment, known as whale bathing, for a number of patients suffering from rheumatic diseases, particularly those afflicted with arthritis. Specifically, patients suffering from chronic joint pain and other rheumatic afflictions should crawl inside the dead animal and sit there, for an extended period of time, in order to be cured of their aches and pains.

First reported in a newspaper in the small seaside village of Eden, in the Twofold Bay region of New South Wales, a whale killed at sea was dragged back to shore by the whaling boat to prepare it for the process of de-blubbering. In classic Australian fashion, nobody’s quite certain of the actual truth of how this led to discovering the dead whale’s medical properties, but there are a few good possible origin stories:

• Late on that dark night, the town drunk tripped and stumbled into the beached carcass and fell asleep, only to wake up the next morning feeling totally sober, and without any symptoms at all.
• A wealthy, eccentric businessman approached the whalers in question to convince to try the cure for himself after dragging the whale ashore; he crawled inside, stayed all night, and crawled out the next morning feeling fantastic.
• The most likely story is that the treatment actually has its roots among the Yuin Aboriginal peoples of New South Wales; cave paintings in the region are believed to depict people crawling inside dissected whales that are being harvested for meat and blubber, and covering themselves with fat in order to treat arthritis and other symptoms.

What are the negatives of this treatment?

Well, the smell, for one. Like all corpses, the body of the whale will fill with gas as it decomposes… only with a LOT more of it. It’s a reasonable assumption that your household water bill will likely quintuple in the month after bathing in the whale carcass; not to mention likely having to taken out a line of credit to afford the soap to scrub oneself.

Not only do whale carcasses reek, but they’ve also been known to blow up – and although the most famous exploding whale was intentionally blown up with dynamite by the Oregon Highway Patrol in 1970 (pictured below), there have been confirmed reports of carcasses blowing up spontaneously from the gas buildup, including in January 2004 in Taiwan, when a dead whale covered bystanders in blood and guts, just like its famous earlier counterpart.

What are some real-life examples of this treatment? 

The town of Eden had a brief boom as a tourist destination for the whale treatment; there are newspaper drawings that share the graphic details of the treatment method which were printed all across New South Wales attracting prospective clients to the seaside. Patients were guaranteed relief from their arthritis symptoms for a minimum of twelve months after undergoing the treatment; that said, I’m quite confident that would be virtually impossible to verify.

As the Australian whaling industry declined in the early 20th century, so too did the practise of whale bathing; as far as I can tell, it is not available anywhere in the world anymore.

How can we improve this treatment for the future?

There are two main issues that exist with this treatment: the ethics and morals of acquiring enough whales to make this a sustainable practise without harming the whale populations, and, more notably, the smell. As such, the solution is simple: continue to provide Americans with calorie-rich, nutrition-deficient diets in order to have them grow to progressively enormous sizes over successive generations. Secondly, encourage all Americans to become infected with the novel coronavirus in order to try and remove their sense of smell for prolonged periods of time. Finally, with enough overweight deceased victims available, thinner, Covid-infected arthritics will eventually have their complete pick of the litter in deciding whose corpse they wish to reside in temporarily as they treat their inflamed joints. Perhaps this solution may be a bit time- and labor-intensive, and there may be some pushback from ethics boards about the morality of force-feeding a generation of people in order to undertake a medical experiment, but may I just remind you all: science has always been, and must always be, all about taking risks!

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Information for this article taken from here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.