Plain Speaking?

The recent medical adventures have got me back onto a couple of things which have bugged me over the past few years. Both are related to medical advertising.

The first is hardly new: the pharmaceutical companies advertise specialized prescription medicines directly to us, the consumers. This asks us to become diagnosticians and figure out what's wrong with us, then go to our doctors and tell them what they ought to prescribe. I thought that one of the reasons to visit a doctor was to ask them to diagnose the problem and prescribe what they think is best.

This is one of the reasons I gave up years ago the reading of "popular psychology" books. I readily identified with the problems described by the authors, but didn't seem to find relief from their suggested therapies; then, on reflection, realized I didn't have the problems, or at least not too severely.

The medical advertisers accomplish somewhat the same thing. Do I have what they're describing? Hey, it kind of feels/acts like that. Maybe I'd better go ask the doctor if old XXX "is right for me." I actually got sucked into that a little bit with medications for "BPH, or enlarged prostate." All those guys, missing the fun because they had to pee. I probably should have seen a urologist much earlier in the process.

And here's our entry to the second thing that irks me. BPH (benign prostatic hypertrophy, or something like that). Maybe my knees hurt from RA (rheumatoid arthritis) as well as from the osteoarthritis that the X-rays show I've got. What about ED (erectile dysfunction)? COPD (who knows, but it means you can't breathe easily)? PAD (peripheral artery disease)? (I don't claim to have all of these.) Pretty soon I'll need a second box of Alpha-Bits to keep up with the D's.

The shortening of disease names to their initials has the effect of making these things seem less serious, less threatening. Hey, maybe with the magic medicine I can have a normal life. The initials also make it easy to slap a label on something, rather than find out the individual nature of people's problem and tailor an appropriate treatment.

I once wrote about a page and a half of a fantasy story in which place names, character names, and other elements had as their names the names of advertised drugs, mostly prescription. The brooding castle Imitrex... as I went, I began trying to attach a medicine name to a place or person somehow related to the nature of the medicine or the problem it was supposed to fix. It's been a few years, and there are many new medications - who knows, maybe they'll have a newspaper, the Daily Cialis, with, er, op-ED pieces.