2714: Cold Complaints

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Cold Complaints

Title text: Our investigation into whining-based remedies became the first study to be halted by the IRB on the grounds that the treatment group was 'too annoying.'

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a GIGANTIC WHINING BABY - Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

When people are ill, they will often complain about the symptoms that they're suffering from. A common sterotype is that men will revert to infantile behavior when miserably sick. This can be annoying to the people around them, but they typically tolerate such behavior out of compassion. The joke in this comic is that Hairy spoke via a telemedicine appointment to Ponytail, a medical professional who explicitly advised him to act out, since his condition has no effective medical treatment. He takes her advice to, "act like you're the first person ever to have a cold," literally, stating it specifically when his companion asks about it.

This comic was published during a "tripledemic" in the U.S., involving COVID-19, influenza, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV, a frequent cause of common colds) infections, the latter of which have no cure other than to wait them out with plenty of rest and fluids. It expounds on the finding that, "talking about troublesome events, including events with which one is dissatisfied, may ... result in improved physiological health." (Kowalski, R.M. (2002) "Whining, griping, and complaining: positivity in the negativity." Journal of clinical psychology, 58(9):1023-35.)

The title text describes a similar study, but where the institutional review board (IRB) halted the study because the participants were too annoying. This is ironic since they would be expected to whine annoyingly. IRBs are expected to review the ethics of a research project. Whining is not usually considered dangerous,^{[citation needed]} but in this case it was presumably so intolerable that they had to put a stop to it.

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.

>DUDE i just LOVE the hustle and bustle of the big city, it’s so DYNAMIC and makes me feel like i’m in one of my favourite TV SHOWS. you should totally come on down to my studio apartment, it’s got EXPOSED RED BRICK walls and everything, we can crack open a nice hoppy ipa or three and get crazy watching some cartoons on adult swim! and dude, dude, DUDE, we have GOTTA go down to the barcade- listen here, right, it’s a BAR where us ADULTS who do ADULTING can go DRINK. BUT!!!! it’s also an ARCADE like when we were kids, so we can play awesome VIDEO GAMES, without dumb kids bothering us. speaking of which megan and i have finally decided to tie the knot- literally -we’re both getting snipped tomorrow at the hospital, that way we can save money to spent more on ourselves and our FURBABIES. i’m fufsdgfhjin JACKED man, i’m gonna SLAM this craft beer and pop open another one!!!