A CURE FOR ACNE? SAVING FACE WITH SCIENTIFIC BALLOONS

"New Scientific research reveals----"

Whenever I see those words coming at me, I go right into fight or flight mode. For a humorist, there is no finer gauntlet. I try to turn away, but once I see a newsbit announcing that scientists have done it again, I'm hooked.

Because I'm a technological savant? Hardly. Did I make my bones as an expert in scientific expertise? Go fish. Do I believe that everything I consider mysterious has a scientific explanation? Poobah.

A carbon-fueled vehicular researcher might know and try to tell me why my truck won't run, citing pie charts of combustion variables and petrol-graphs of exothermic fuel reactions, but I know that pounding a steering wheel will usually start a cold engine.

Even then, this method of bash-ignition is exponentially determined by how late you are for your dentist appointment, and you won't find that in a textbook.

When scientists come up with an orthodontic-jumpstart theory, I'll be there.

Bottom line is, there are simply some bottom lines I don't want explained to me in scientific terms, not because I can't fathom them, but because I prefer magical thinking.

Scientists call this: "non-scientific causal reasoning." I call it keeping the child within alive. Remember those "Why is the sky blue?" conversations with your inquiring offspring? Did you answer in dipole scatterings and radiation attenuations, or did you talk blueberry paintbrushes?

Okay, I admit it: As a grown-up, I've surrendered some of the blueberry palette rationale. We all know that the real reason for a blue sky today is that it's the one day we have off this week and we have to spend it in the basement fixing the sump pump.

Scientists may find respite in knowing that leaves drop from trees due to a complex botanical excretory process. We know better. If leaves didn't fall, you couldn't get a decent Halloween goblin off the ground. Good enough for me.

But, today, when I read that "new scientific research reveals that stress can cause acne," I dropped my guard and let the eggheads roll. This time, they might just have something:

The lab coats at Wake Forest followed 94 mild to moderately acneiformed high school students for several months. They made two important discoveries:

1. High school students don't like being followed.

2. One-fourth of them had severe acne "breakouts" just before major exams.

Here, we must insert a humorist's qualifier: I believe it was the Wake Forest researchers who also once determined, after months of treadmill stress tests and studying senescence homeostatics, that human locomotion was compromised by aging:

Only a scientist would be driven to find out why old folks don't move as fast as younger ones.

But, even then, this conclusion is not absolute. I once saw my grandma outrun a rabid wolverine until she realized it was our housecat. Still, if we'd put a clock on her, she would have bested the Wake Forest findings.

Another scientific study debunked.

However, this latest pimple project has some merit. Because they found that the levels of sebum in the tested students did not increase at the time of their facial eruptions, they attribute the flare-ups solely to the stress the students suffered at pre-exam time, when 25% of them became temporarily pizza-faced.

Sebum is one of those good-science, bad-science substances in the body. Too much sebum, and we get ear wax, oily hair and acne. Not enough, and we look and feel like reptiles and/or my Uncle Wiley.

Just the right amount of sebum, and our cars will start three out of four times (my column, my science).

I can now take comfort in knowing that when I had to do that oral presentation for my junior year science class on the anatomy of a bug, the reason I developed and displayed that cyclopean boil which turned my face into a human bulls' eye the night before, may not have been due to a genetic defect, but rather my worried anticipation of having to verbally present my working knowledge of ant kidneys while dodging a hail of spitballs aimed at my bubble monster.

Here, the scientists are quite correct in their math. Thirty of us in class, and I remember there were seven or eight of us whose faces resembled the working end of an orangutan on test day.

But, hold it right here! Even scientists must now admit that indefinable forces are at work when it comes to this bane of adolescent growth and development. The causers-and-effectors must now concede that one out of four teenagers may over-pustulate & papulate because of a fretful mindset that can't be measured with an oscillating balloon.

My scientific conclusions?

A balloon oscillates because the child on the end of its tether can't sit still under a blueberry sky, and at least one-quarter of me is now three-quarters certain that science causes pimples.

Copyright 2007 B. Elwin Sherman. All rights reserved.