Drugs and TV

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint. - Mark Twain

Twain’s words made me think of the direct-to-consumer marketing of drugs. This fairly recent phenomenon includes television commercials in which pharmaceutical companies attempt to convince me that only their drug will cure my ills. Whether I am too happy, too sad, too fat, too thin or just too un-drugged, there is a medicine out there that will fix me.

While the advertisements show me all the wonderful things that will result from my taking a particular drug, it is what the side effect list communicates that always catches my attention. Usually buried at the end of the ad, the list of side effects is rattled off like so many niggling details. One can almost hear the marketing people sighing with annoyance that federal law requires they include these pesky particulars.

Have you listened closely to the lists? Call me crazy but I would count “death” as a pretty serious side effect. The drug commercial that had “death” in its list was recently redone and the word “death” was removed.

Since death is no longer a side effect, I can only assume that the patients who died have miraculously been reborn. Therefore, wouldn’t it be more accurate to list both death and resurrection as side effects?

I make this sarcastic statement because I do not understand how a drug can be advertised on television and sold to the public if one of the known side effects is death. I also wonder how that side effect got removed from the list. I assume the drug company decided “death” was not something they wanted me to know about.

It may not sound like it, but I am a big fan of good drugs. The right medication applied in the correct way to a specific problem can be a miracle. Penicillin saved my life when I was a child. However, we must remember that drug companies do what they do to make money. That is the only job of any company.

The drug ads communicate on several levels. While the drug may be intended for good, we should take that list of side effects seriously. It doesn't make sense to demand that our doctors give us a pill that will kill us.

Properly vetted

A writer friend of mine insists that the restrictions placed on membership by professional genre fiction writing organizations and conventions are there because it assures the writers applying for membership have been properly vetted.

The term means that a writer’s work has been confirmed as accurate, that agents have screened it and editors have honed it. Of course, my friend is ignoring the obvious – no writer is properly vetted anymore. The big publishers refuse to pay for it and the small ones never could afford it. James Frey and Margaret Selzer are just two recent examples of writers published by major publishing houses who were exposed as frauds. Sadly, this lack of real vetting applies to journalism as well.

How does all this happen? We readers allow it. We settle for less than the best. We do not demand excellence. We accept what we are told without question because it comes from our newspaper, television, the Internet or an email from a friend. How many false stories circulate because no one stops to check the facts? Thank goodness for www.snopes.com.

In All the President’s Men, a book about the scandal that forced Nixon from the White House, the reporters dug out the facts, they followed the trail and they told us what was happening. They did not partner with the government; they exposed it. Why can we trust what they revealed? They had to obtain confirmations of their facts from at least two separate sources and those sources could not be other reporters. Their editor would not allow the story to go to press without that substantiation.

As citizens, it is our responsibility to question everything we are told. We should not assume that our representatives in government will act honorably – especially since there is so much proof that they will not. Greed and graft has been part of government since time began. This country is no exception. Mark Twain said it best. “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.”

All writers should produce work that is properly vetted. All editors should require confirmation, checking sources and validating the facts. I’d like to see the population demand that higher standard.

We will be better for it – as readers and as citizens.