Americans love their drugs too much.
The Federal Department of Agriculture reached a new low last
week when it approved a diet pill for dogs.
The same organization that can’t seem to figure out
exactly how to prevent farmers from contaminating produce with cow
manure has been hard at work.
The new diet pill, called Slentrol, was designed exclusively
with canines in mind. It claims to reduce the appetites of pudgy
puppies and lower the amount of fat absorbed by their porky
bodies.
So instead of making the great effort to not get off the couch
and feed your dog, you can load him into the car, drive him to your
veterinarian’s office, and pay for a prescription of
Slentrol.
Serendipity, a calico cat featured in the Los Angeles Times, was
put on antidepressants by her owners after she started attacking
them.
When my cat attacks me, I throw a pillow at her. No costly
prescriptions needed.
These new developments surfaced at about the same time the
Federal Trade Commission announced it was levying fines against
four different brands of diet pills for false advertising.
Pretending that magical pills are the key to a trim figure will
cost the manufacturers a collective $25 million.
Although these news stories may appear only to serve as another
example of the United State’s fixation with vanity, it is
also indicative of a much larger trend: our over-zealous obsessions
with medication.
If it ain’t broke, we love to find ways to fix it. After
facing the drastic medical emergency of 80-year-old men not being
able to maintain a good boner, we invented a pill.
We noticed that in school, young boys would often become rowdy
““ so we invented Ritalin.
Commercials, which were once the domain of M&M and Nike,
suddenly began featuring drug companies. Every day I watch
30-second ad campaigns diagnose medical conditions I had always
taken for granted as a part of life: feeling sad, being nervous in
front of large crowds, having occasional trouble getting to
sleep.
But now the commercials are running out of common experiences to
diagnose and cure, so they’ve moved on to the completely
ridiculous.
Have you seen the latest ads for “Restless Leg
Syndrome”? Being fidgety is now a medical condition ““
complete with, you guessed it, a handy dandy pill you can take to
cure it.
Consumer Reports’ chief medical advisor, Dr. Marvin
Lipman, stated that 78 percent of physicians surveyed in a recent
study reported receiving “I saw it on TV” requests for
particular prescription drugs.
The magazine also reported that 40 percent of doctors surveyed
felt that ads for prescription drugs were a
“disservice” to the public.
Worse yet, Dr. William Plested, president of the American
Medical Association, told the Atlanta Journal Constitution that
“people “˜doctor shop’ if their own doctors
don’t give them what they want.”
I do not object to medical solutions used to treat medical
problems. I am sure there are cases when problems like the ones I
mentioned above do warrant medical treatment.
But I just don’t see the need to advertise these
medications to the general public. Maybe I’m old-fashioned,
but I miss the days when a person went to the doctor only after
discovering on his own that he was sick ““ without the aid of
infomercials.
There is, of course, a price to be paid for our medicine
obsession. Often the drugs we see advertised in commercials are
more costly and less effective than other drugs.
It also seems from the breathless description of side-effects at
the end of these ads that the cure can be worse than the
disease.
Slentrol, for instance, may cause Fido to vomit or experience
diarrhea all over your new carpet.
The much advertised Nexium, a drug developed to treat heartburn,
has been linked with decreased bone density and hip fractures.
And giving your cat Prozac will cause other people to laugh at
you.
I am even suspicious of medications doctors go out of their way
to recommend to me.
Over winter break I had the pleasure of having my wisdom teeth
removed. The bottle of pills the oral surgeon sent home with me to
help numb the pain caused me to throw up repeatedly, which in turn
aggravated the wounds in my mouth and caused my jaw to ache even
worse than before.
An ounce of paranoia is worth a pound of prescription drugs.
Ever taken sleeping pills before a final? Send your horror
stories to kstrickland@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to
viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.