Normally, I wouldn't contribute to a thread like this; it addresses questions which are too fundamental. But, after some lurking bug has sent me running to the toilet for the fourth time in three weeks, I can't hold it in much longer.

At the risk of sounding like my own mother, I seriously doubt the dedication of the medical and pharmaceutical professions to dealing with these problems. When once the quack would prescribe a kaolin and morphine mixture, which the chemist would make up with much measuring and pouring, I now get a packet of capsules with a meaningless commercially registered stream of syllables for a name and a ten-page puff piece for directions, telling me that the manufacturers deserve a Nobel Prize for making such a "fast effective relief".

The capsules are, I must inform my quack, useless. So far as I can tell, their chief recommendation as medicine is that they have been determined after prolonged and rigorous tests to be no use as a weapon of mass murder of rabbits and sad-eyed beagles in Cambridge laboratories. Kaolin and morphine might not have been rocket science, but it kept matters under control until one's own digestive system had a chance to rally and restore normal equilibrium.

My own pet remedy (actually no fix but prevents the bilious headaches and cramps caused by dehydration after prolonged trips to the throne); a pint of water with a teaspoon of sugar and a couple of pinches of salt.

Assuming I don't croak from the "Delhi belly", I pass fifty years old in a month. I am getting into practice as a complaining old git.