Nothing plagues me like gas. Not the kind in my alimentary canal. The gas I refer to is a relentless, greedy, hypercapitalism at its very core. Bill Maher put it perfectly when he said the United States is a wholly owned subsidiary of the pharmaceutical industry. I cannot watch a single program that some asshat media planner hasn’t figured out how old I am, what I watch and how big my fucking prostate is.
Levitra, Celebrex, Viagra, Ciallus, Bayer, Avodart. These aren’t medicines. They are Master of the Universe. Me? I’m taking Skeletor.
Think about this: Pharmaceutical industry insiders wrote the legislation on the books right now. Most of the advertising dollars to me and my wife are Pharmaceutical. Yet medicine for me is more expensive than someone my age in 28 European nations. The infant mortality rate in the USA is worse than in Cuba. My mother, thanks to AARP has to beg for her medicine, and in general our care is deteriorating.
There is something very sick about delivering medicine just to make money.
Watch the TV these days and it’s obvious that commercials have basically become visits to the apothecary. We are getting two and three minute mini infomercials on diseases that aren’t even life threatening, yet they are a laundry list of symptoms and side-effects and legal copy. They are taking over the world, these pharmaceutical corporations.
And they are just making up diseases out of normal problems and trying to sell us medicines for them.
"My doctor said I had BAT. I said BAT? He said ‘Yes, BAT, and BAT’ can cause ED".
This is the shit that medicine has become in America. It’s not medicine. It’s all marketing and shareholders dividends.
Most forms of advertising, to some degree, rely on "information asymmetry," the idea that the party doing the marketing knows more about the product and how to sell it than the consumer. Information asymmetries result in higher profits for advertisers. It is, thus, in their interest to increase the divide: for them to know more, and the consumer, less. When the product is chewing gum, the imbalance is usually no big deal. But when you’re talking about something as crucial as health care–where the opportunities for information asymmetries happen to be much greater–all sorts of problems crop up.
Pharmaceutical companies argue that direct-to-consumer drug advertising "empowers" the patient to learn more about medical options. As I mentioned earlier (page 30), this is pretty much a joke, for these drug ads are as uninformative and image-oriented as Calvin Klein ads (although much less sexy). They’re also not geared toward educating people about medical options, which would include drug-free or otherwise unprofitable practices.
What’s more, drug companies know that high information asymmetry in health care has been well-documented since the 1960s. Drug companies also know that patients–although ignorant of professional medical standards–routinely overestimate their ability to make medical judgments. The line about advertising "empowering" thus becomes a cruel irony, encouraging patients to rely even more on their own misjudgments.
http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/...
But it’s not just pharmaceutical companies deciding what medicines to dispense, the media companies are deciding what is the best medical advice to give or allow aired on their stations. For example, Fox and CBS turn down condom ads from Trojans.
Fox and CBS both rejected the commercial. Both had accepted Trojan’s previous campaign, which urged condom use because of the possibility that a partner might be H.I.V.-positive, perhaps unknowingly. A 2001 report about condom advertising by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation found that, "Some networks draw a strong line between messages about disease prevention — which may be allowed — and those about pregnancy prevention, which may be considered controversial for religious and moral reasons." Representatives for both Fox and CBS confirmed that they had refused the ads, but declined to comment further. In a written response to Trojan, though, Fox said that it had rejected the spot because, "Contraceptive advertising must stress health-related uses rather than the prevention of pregnancy." In its rejection, CBS wrote, "while we understand and appreciate the humor of this creative, we do not find it appropriate for our network even with late-night-only restrictions."
http://www.nytimes.com/...
In many cases the pharmaceuticals are just repackaging the same old medicines and trying to sell them for similar illnesses. Take Take Tylenol. There’s a Tylenol for back ache and Tylenol for headache and even an extra-strength Tylenol for pain. Yet the active ingredient is exactly the same and virtually the exact same dose between these. So what then are you paying for? Medicine or marketing?
{At the end of the day you get sick and then go to the store and see a literal constellation of medicines and their variants. All you need right a t a moment like that- to have to make another goddamned decision. So you look around and try to read the fine print and just end up picking up Nyquil anyway because it IS the strongest medicine on Earth. I mean it come with a SHOT GLASS for Christ’s sake.
Here’s how Nyquil works. You get a cold. You take Nyquil. It puts you in a coma. While you are in your coma, you heal. Three days later you wake up.}
But there are larger questions about running medicine the same way you run a corporation.
For generations following the first American Medical Association (AMA) Code of Ethics in 1847, the relationship between doctors and advertising remained unambiguous—advertising was forbidden. In 1975, however, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) accused the profession of "restraint of trade" and legally persuaded doctors to permit advertising amongst their clan. As the 1970s witnessed the relentless burgeoning of healthcare expenditure, physicians accepted the blame for immuring themselves from the natural forces of economics. American physicians were bullied to embrace advertising under the delusion that doctoring—like any trade—would become better and cheaper if incited by competition. Today most American physicians engage in some form of paid advertising, yet it is doubtful that physician advertising has either augmented the quality or diminished the cost of health care. Advertisement has eroded medical professionalism by denying doctors the right to enforce ethical boundaries between themselves and the "let the buyer beware" world of business.
http://jme.bmj.com/...
So that’s the rub. Advertising medicine might be good for business.
The question is- is it good for medicine?
I think it’s fair to say that the notion of unfettered capitalism and pure medicine ought not be prescribed any further. Capitalism is about making money, Medicine is about healing. If anything is sick, it’s the idea that the dollar trumps health and life.
That notion about medicine being improved by competition itself was born of the Republicans and the AEI ‘fellows’. It has been proven wrong. Capitalism should be highly regulated when it comes to medicine.
We truly have to start medicine all over. In Amsterdam, a few doctors make really good money. They drive nice cars and live in those little river boats parked all over the canals. Most of them, however, live just beyond middle class. They ride bikes to work, rent apartments and look for discount clothing.
If American doctors are making so much more than Dutch doctors, then why is the care here worse by a long shot? Is it wrong to ask why the US of A can’t have what every industrialized nation has?
Two things have to happen. We have to take marketing medicine back into just regular old medicine. And we have to make the medicine, not the marketing, available to everyone.