19th Feb 2008
Medical Science will save Mabel!
Oh, those charming days when medical science was just learning what amazing things could be done with chemicals.
For example: Mabel is unstable, let’s sedate her with (highly addictive) barbituates until the change is over. Why not just lock her in the cellar and pretend she’s visiting a distant cousin for a few months, that way friends won’t need to be bothered at all with Mabel’s suffering?
For even more creep factor, check out the advertisements for the anti-psychotic Thorazine. Not just for schizophrenia, apparently; it can also be used by alcoholics, crotchety old men, housewives, and cancer victims.
The tendency to drug behavior problems hasn’t really decreased with time, although hopefully modern medicine would choose something gentler than Thorazine for depression. (Seriously — Thorazine?!? Maybe she’s screaming because you’re shooting her up when she just wants to get out of the house for a bit.) It’s very common to see advertisements for all sorts of things — allergy medication, restless leg syndrome medication, insomnia medication, depression medication, genital herpes medication, erectile dysfunction medication…
There are absolutely valid scenarios in which medication should be used. Thorazine might be able to help the alcoholic, for example, if his problem is caused by obsessive-compulsive drinking combined with depression. But advertising is designed to sell product, and it does so by making you imagine a problem that it can solve. In the case of the pharmaceutical industry, they make you desire a medication and you therefore decide you’ve got a disease to match. My father-in-law is a pediatrician; if you want to hear a good rant, ask him about parents who decide their child has a syndrome (usually allergies) which needs to be addressed with the latest advertised drug. Now that there is a drug to treat it, lots of people are being diagnosed (or self-diagnosed) with restless leg syndrome; in reality they are just tired, stressed, and/or over-caffeinated. Not a whole lot has changed in fifty years of medication advertising.
I find it creepy to watch commercials in which Bob has “something about him” after he’s started taking Viagra (or is it Cialis? I haven’t kept track), in which the obvious joke is that Bob is walking around with a massive erection and that’s why everybody now values him more. It is a whole different class of creepy to advocate dosing Gramps with Thorazine so you don’t have to get hit with his cane, or sedate Mabel so you don’t have to get hit with a mood swing. The tone has improved, but there’s a long way to go before we could consider them to be sensitive to sick people.
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