Ranting time.
Now, I’m not being judgmental here (wink, wink), but there are some moments in life where I simply have to resort to using one of Mugatu’s most awesome lines in Zoolander: “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!” Well, if I am to follow the advice given by the flood of commercials for various medications, I suppose I should. This also drives me nuts. Just take a moment to think about it: You watch one commercial for, say, 30 seconds, and all of sudden you’re a freaking expert on the solution to your health problem. Forget any extra (or actual) research or finding out about alternatives. When those commercials say “Ask your doctor about _____.”, we all know what that really means. No American asks for something. We tell people what we want. Go back to the last time you went and ordered something from the drive thru. Your conversation probably went like this:
“May I take your order?”
“Yeah, I’ll have the number three with no ketchup, cheese, onions or mayonnaise. But I want extra pickles. And I mean extra pickles.”
So you drive up and the first thing you do is aggressively interrogate the server before you’ve even seen the sandwich. “Did you get my extra pickles?”
(By the way, what ever happened to using “please” and “thank you”? It’s as though the use of basic manners is comparable to the fragile existence of an endangered species.)
Now, taking this natural tendency that most of us have and then couple it with the diabolical genius of the pharmaceutical and marketing industries, and well, we’re basically done for. That’s how it’s become the multi-billion dollar industry that it is. Just show images of happy people with perfect teeth playing in front of a perfectly manicured lawn, a painted house, sunshine and a frolicking, non-mangy dog. Throw a puffy-cheeked kid in the scene and/or a car and you’ve basically covered every pharmaceutical commercial except for Viagra. Or maybe some anti-depressant commercials.
All of a sudden, you want this. You’re starting to associate yourself with that images that you’ve seen and turn a deaf ear to the last spoken portion of the commercial. “Side effects may include: loss of appetite, sleep depravation, increase in appetite, weight gain, weight loss, depression, losing an ear, growing a third ear, hallucinating to the point of wanting to have as much plastic surgery as Joan Rivers, sleepwalking, an enlarged heart, shortness of breath, sudden death and thoughts of suicide.”
Really, with the exception of the ears gained/lost and a direct comparison to Joan Rivers, I’ve actually heard all of these comments on real commercials! And this is super-scary to me because I know that people have truly been going to their doctors, “asking” to receive Product X without truly having looked into it. (Otherwise, the frequency of such commercials would have decreased – not the opposite.) And by asking, we all know that means “strongly suggesting”. Forget the fact that their doctor most likely has nearly a decade’s worth of specialized schooling and training under his or her belt; that commercial has made the patient, no, the consumer, the expert.
And now, during their 5minute consultation (don’t get me started on that), the doctor is likely in the precarious position of having to explain why one shouldn’t take a certain drug just because it was advertised so beautifully on TV. And let’s be honest here: Whether these people walk away with or without that prescription, they feel kinda smug because they’re convinced that they know just as much as their doctor. Then they go and brag about this misconceived perception to others. “Can you believe my doctor didn’t even mention Product X? The nerve!"
Then, months later when scores of people are sleep eating, operating vehicles and heavy machinery while asleep, or worse, lose their lives or endanger the lives of others, a world collectively questions why such things can happen.
xoxo CountryEuroCityMouse
© 2012 CountryEuroCityMouse™. All rights reserved.
