Drug Company Advertising

Even though we have satellite TV, which we got for our younger son and so Mark could follow the NBA, I don’t watch it much, and when I do I am continually astounded by the commercials. Instead of seeing the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet and getting your wash sparkling clean with Tide and Cheer, we can now ingest drugs for erectile dysfunction, arthritis, constipation, osteoporosis, high cholesterol, fibromyalgia, dry eyes, and depression. The commercials all end with a list of potential side effects for each drug —dizziness, weight gain, blindness and heart attack—along with the caveat, “Ask your doctor if this drug is right for you,” but what do we need doctors for? The drug companies have identified the diseases, designed the drugs, and have apparently bought off the doctors who now prescribe the medicine. The patient just needs to tell the doctor, “I saw Viagra advertised on TV and I want some,” and voila, he’s got an erection.

I’m old enough to remember when doctors not only diagnosed and prescribed the drugs, they actually came to your house to do so. When I was in grade school, our doctor in Colorado Springs came to the house when we were too sick to go to his office. Which usually meant we had the chicken pox, measles, mumps, or the flu. Now, of course, they have vaccines for all of these diseases, but in those days all the kids got them and were down for at least a week or two. I remember when I had one of them, and the doctor wanted to give me a shot, I ran out of the bedroom and into the closet in the kitchen that went under the stairs. This was a very deep closet, full of all kinds of things besides clothes, and required a major extraction by my parents, with a lot of kicking and screaming on my part. But the good-natured doctor waited until I quit screaming and still gave me the shot.

Even with the new vaccines there are plenty of diseases out there that need a drug — mainly all our new “lifestyle” diseases — ergo all the drug advertising on TV to all the couch potatoes watching it. Everyone over 60 seems to be on medicine to reduce their high blood pressure and cholesterol. Type II diabetes is epidemic, but weight loss medication will allow you to drop the pounds without ever passing up that piece of strawberry cheesecake or walking farther than the car to the house. Environmentally caused auto immune diseases like fibromyalgia are bringing once active people to their knees with chronic pain and loss of energy. Lyrica, however, will help you do all those things you used to love to do, like watering your plants and going on vacation to Bermuda. Baby boomers are dropping like flies with hip, knee, and even shoulder replacements, after years of pounding their joints by running on pavement or climbing across all those scree fields on their mountain ascents. But Boniva once a month will keep those bones strong and sturdy, and Ativa once a year will keep that “on the go woman” going.

After being bombarded nightly by these unfulfilled promises no wonder everyone is depressed and can’t sleep. But there are plenty of drugs for that, too. No more of those hard core barbiturates, you can take Ambien and Lunesta, which will lull you into a gentle sleep and make you fresh and alert the next day, assuming you don’t have any of the potential side effects like walking in your sleep and falling down the stairs or falling asleep while you’re driving, which a former Santa Fe county commissioner did, claiming Ambien made him crash into that parked car on the side of the street. If you’re depressed you can take Zoloft or Prozac and get rid of all that anxiety and worry about whether you’re going to have to spend the last of your paycheck on a tank of gas or enough groceries to get you through the week. You may even have to cancel your high-speed Internet connection, or god forbid, your satellite TV service that allowed you to find out all about Prozac in the first place.
So we’re all going to live to be 90 as long as we take our daily regimen of 20 or so different medications every morning and night that are probably working against each other to counteract each one’s desired effect, leaving us all demented. But hey, we’re not dead, and apparently that’s all that matters.