I would like to begin this week’s blog with a comment, “I think we are a nation of hypochondriacs.”
Why do I make that comment?
Simple. Take a good look at the advertisements on television. The airwaves are flooded with ads for prescribed medicines. Everywhere you look there is an ad for some medication that will make you sleep, make you stay awake, make you go the bathroom, make you stop going to the bathroom, to help you breathe, or to ease your mental problems.
During my first year at Belleville Area College, I was required to read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The book was published in 1932; it spoke of an ideal world with worldwide bliss achieved through a government regulated and required pill called Soma. Though written as satire, it appears to have reached some level of prophesy.
Now, do not misunderstand me; medicines are required for the sustaining of life. I take prescribed pills everyday. Chemo-therapy has saved countless lives. But, maybe we have been led to believe we need more medicines - - Somas - - than we actually do need.
Let us face facts; if pharmaceuticals do not sell their products, no profits are made. Too, we, as a nation, are always wanting to find cures for our maladies.
Medication comes with some costs or risks involved. The warnings of the adverse effects rattled off at the end of the commercial should tell us not all is good with medicines. My former cardiologist once told me, “Medicine is poison to your body.”
In a sense, he was correct. Have you really listened to some of those adverse warnings?
One recent advertisement for a medication listed a fatal heart attack as its first adverse warning. What illness do you have that in order to control it you can die from a heart attack? And some adverse warnings seem ludicrous. A sleep aid warns drowsiness may occur. (Hello? I thought that is what we wanted from a sleep aid.) An anti-diarrhea medicine warns of constipation. (Well, at least I can leave the bathroom, now.)
This next part may be crass, but all erectile dysfunctional medicines warn of the possible adverse reaction of an erection that may last longer than four hours. I really hate to tell the drug manufacturers this, but that is every male’s fantasy.
Yes, I think we have become a nation of hypochondriacs, but it seems our cures may cause us more and actual ills.
Have a good week.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Yeh, I agree grandpa. The world nowadays is so dependent on the use of pharmaceuticals, that we don't seem to care what the possible adversities are. Like maybe this will make you better. Maybe it will shut down your heart, kidneys, and liver at the same time. Only way to know, is to take it. Seems a lil too chancy to me.
Funny how you mention hypochondria and Brave New World in the same note. After reading it, I felt it truly captured a reasonable image of how a government could conquer a people relatively easily. I actually felt it was a better portrayal of how such an act could be done than what George Orwell presented in 1984. Simply feed people happiness and they become reliant on the government to the point of addiction. People can't function without whatever it is that feeds their addiction and they begin to give up liberties for the sake of their happiness. The medical dilemma you discuss here offers an interesting parallel. We become so reliant on medication that our body forgets how to function on its own and we thereby become addicted to the medication in order to function properly. Just another method by which people exploit the failures of man for money and personal gain. We need to learn to be a world of self-reliant men. I'm such a cynical anarchist.
Post a Comment