Fungus
"Tell your doctor if you have been to areas where certain fungal infections are common."
Healthcare is so fucked up. The above line is just one of the many disclaimers/legal-beagle shit in a television commercial for Humira that pisses me off every time I see it. Humira, if memory serves, is for inflammatory bowel disease. Which, thank God, the closest I come to is the Humira advertisement. Which seems to be everywhere.
My concerns about this one line, in no particular order, are ...
1 -- Shouldn't your doctor be asking you about where you might have been? Rather than expecting you to tell him, based on instructions you received, via a television commercial, from the concerned folks at some nameless pharmaceutical company? And while we're at it, if they want to be helpful, why don't they go ahead and say something like, "Oh, also tell him if you're allergic to any medications." Or "Oh, why don't you tell him if you're pregnant." Or any number of things that might be helpful for him to know. Assuming he's stupid enough not to ask.
2 -- What does the line "you have been to areas where certain fungal infections are common" even mean? Why don't they tell us what the area is? Or what the fungal infections might be? I constantly find myself wondering if I've been to areas where certain fungal infections are common.
3 -- Just for the record, I would immediately tell my doctor that I've been to the United States, which is definitely an area where certain fungal infections are common. I may have gotten pityrosporum just by walking out the door. Which is a fungus that causes dandruff. Or, were I a woman, how about candida albicans, which is the candida in vaginal candidiasis, which is mumbo-jumbo for a yeast infection? Let's not even talk about the shit that gets between your toes at the gym.
Why are we being so fucking coy? I hate drug companies.
4 -- And this is the big one: Think of how much less your drugs would cost if the pharmaceutical companies spent less advertising prescription drugs to the general public. How many Viagra commercials do you see during the average football game? That shit ain't cheap. You think that by now the average elderly male doesn't know there are pills available to treat erectile disfunction?
5 -- Can you envision a scenario in which the doctor says to you "I'm going to prescribe some Viagra for your condition" and you respond by saying "Could I have Cialus instead, Doc? I love the scenes of those people in the bathtubs."
Ahhhh. Western medicine at its finest.
6 -- And what's up with those bathtubs anyway? Wouldn't it make sense if, having taken your medication, you got in the same tub as your sweetie?
7 -- And back to inflammatory bowel disease. Which, I can promise you, is a) no picnic and b) an extremely complicated therapeutic challenge. Fine, I suppose, if you've got a hard-on for one ED drug rather than another. But are we really comfortable with consumers influencing the drugs their physicians are prescribing based on having watched a television commercial?
The whole thing bugs me so much I'm not even going to go back and proof this for typos.
Fuck 'em. Just push "Publish."
I am.
Healthcare is so fucked up. The above line is just one of the many disclaimers/legal-beagle shit in a television commercial for Humira that pisses me off every time I see it. Humira, if memory serves, is for inflammatory bowel disease. Which, thank God, the closest I come to is the Humira advertisement. Which seems to be everywhere.
My concerns about this one line, in no particular order, are ...
1 -- Shouldn't your doctor be asking you about where you might have been? Rather than expecting you to tell him, based on instructions you received, via a television commercial, from the concerned folks at some nameless pharmaceutical company? And while we're at it, if they want to be helpful, why don't they go ahead and say something like, "Oh, also tell him if you're allergic to any medications." Or "Oh, why don't you tell him if you're pregnant." Or any number of things that might be helpful for him to know. Assuming he's stupid enough not to ask.
2 -- What does the line "you have been to areas where certain fungal infections are common" even mean? Why don't they tell us what the area is? Or what the fungal infections might be? I constantly find myself wondering if I've been to areas where certain fungal infections are common.
3 -- Just for the record, I would immediately tell my doctor that I've been to the United States, which is definitely an area where certain fungal infections are common. I may have gotten pityrosporum just by walking out the door. Which is a fungus that causes dandruff. Or, were I a woman, how about candida albicans, which is the candida in vaginal candidiasis, which is mumbo-jumbo for a yeast infection? Let's not even talk about the shit that gets between your toes at the gym.
Why are we being so fucking coy? I hate drug companies.
4 -- And this is the big one: Think of how much less your drugs would cost if the pharmaceutical companies spent less advertising prescription drugs to the general public. How many Viagra commercials do you see during the average football game? That shit ain't cheap. You think that by now the average elderly male doesn't know there are pills available to treat erectile disfunction?
5 -- Can you envision a scenario in which the doctor says to you "I'm going to prescribe some Viagra for your condition" and you respond by saying "Could I have Cialus instead, Doc? I love the scenes of those people in the bathtubs."
Ahhhh. Western medicine at its finest.
6 -- And what's up with those bathtubs anyway? Wouldn't it make sense if, having taken your medication, you got in the same tub as your sweetie?
7 -- And back to inflammatory bowel disease. Which, I can promise you, is a) no picnic and b) an extremely complicated therapeutic challenge. Fine, I suppose, if you've got a hard-on for one ED drug rather than another. But are we really comfortable with consumers influencing the drugs their physicians are prescribing based on having watched a television commercial?
The whole thing bugs me so much I'm not even going to go back and proof this for typos.
Fuck 'em. Just push "Publish."
I am.
posted by Geoffrey at 6:20 PM
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