Hugs, not Drugs

It's not just me-have you noticed all the ads on television, all kinds of television, for prescription drugs? It's amazing considering how most of us don't have Print Shop 6 or any other means of manufacturing our own prescription pads, with DEA numbers, to write ourselves an order for some Detrol LA with a side car of (I don't know) Yaz, let's say. (I've always wondered how Red Sox fans felt about that drug's name.)

As a kid, Dr. Alice Tyndall in Red Bank, New Jersey, who made housecalls (I'll pause while some of the older of you explain to the youngsters that a housecall was when the doctor came to you, at a particular and scheduled time, because you were too sick to go to the office. Kind of like Domino's Thirty Minutes or Less promise, but hold the pepperoni) would thump me on my back with the pointer and middle fingers of one hand while listening to my lungs with her stethoscope, jot down some notes, huddle with my mom and if she didn't have the medicine in her bag (a bag that looked like one of those Felix the Cat Bag 'o' Tricks bags, to be honest), she'd write out a prescription and all I ever knew (and I think, all my parents did, too) was that this was the medicine Dr Tyndall wanted me to take. And that was that.

Now in the length of one of the TV reality shows, like Surviving Run's Cribs, or Pimp My Big Brother or Life with Anna Nicole (cancelled?!? What do you mean cancelled? There's no cancelled in reality TV), I've watched advertising that only obliquely suggests what some of this stuff might even be for. My favorites always involve a doctor's office where the physician is recapping in a conversational tone (as if speaking to the 'patient' on the other side of the desk) the warnings and cautions that the drug manufacturers are required to tell you about.

I crack up with that scene...I go to six different physicians in six different practices at the moment for a variety of maladies (I get frequent flier miles on Jet Blue (Cross/Blue Shield) Airlines) and none of them, absolutely none of them have ever looked at me for one tenth the amount of time the TV doctors make eye contact in the commercials much less taken me into their 'office'. And that's true for you as well.

Here's the real TV commercial....Me: 'I think you should prescribe holymoly decongestant tablets for me. Their TV spot is super.' My Doctor: 'Oh, stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night did we? Here, let me put this thermometer under your tongue.' Me: 'But that's not where you had the previous patient put it!.' And let's not forgot about the guy with the infomercials hawking a book for $29.99 of Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You to Know About (now it's half-off! What does that mean? Perhaps this is what it really means). And he's not alone--there's the Colon Cleanse guy (there's a great idea for next weekend, doncha think? You'll be so clean, you'll squeak when you walk) and all the rest of the Medicine Show(men and women).

The patent medicines are too numerous to name or even worry about and their commericals just wash over me. It's the direct-to-me at home ads for prescription drugs that numb me. I have trouble with how many ibuprofen to take in a day--now I'm gonna engage in counterpoint with a health care professional on actual drugs? Unless I'm on actual drugs, how can I know enough to realize I don't know what I don't know. In a country where we do instant polling to tell our leaders how to make decisions whose impacts and implications will reverberate for decades, perhaps drive-by prescribing is the most logical next step. Especially if we're closer to being lemmings than previously believed.
-bill kenny