"Do you want to cause me pain or pleasure at a whim? Or otherwise control me? I'd think you had enough going on as it is," though the idea doesn't alarm him as much as perhaps it should. People here don't seem to care that he's sick, and he feels the shame of it less in the abstract, but he still hates the reality of the seizures when he has them -- the loss of control over his body, the helplessness, the mess, the fear and anxiety in Laertes afterwards, even though he tries not to show it for Sagramore's sake. He feels sometimes as if he's taken every cure in the world, herbs and drinks and blood-letting, efforts to balance his humors, aromatics and hypnotism, purgitives, baths, diets, inhalation of smoke from a burned goat's liver, his own blood rubbed on his lips during a seizure, talismans, ointments of peony, the blood of strong and healthy men given as a drink, changes in air and observation of the lunar cycle, exorcism, cramp rings, abstinence, a feather dipped in oil smeared around the inside of his mouth. None of these treatments has ever made him whole, and drinking Luo Binghe's blood hardly seems worse.