The Science of lies V: "there's a pill™ for that..."

Have you ever wondered: 'why are all our kids on Ritalin these days?', or 'how is it that every second commercial on the idiot box seems to list symptoms that are clear signs that YOU are depressed?'. Me too. Funny enough there is an answer for that. You see the big pharma companies decided that putting the message in medical journals and other periodicals which doctors frequently read just wasn't driving enough sales. So without even a slight modification to the sales pitch, they began to advertise to us directly, except, they have never sent us any of the 'safety reports', 'case studies', or any other 'clinical results' for the meds they want us to ask for by name.

Yes direct to consumer marketing, but with adds tooled towards Doctors and Pharmacists. Who does this? Does the automotive industry tell us all the mechanical detail about the car they are advertising? No, some of the details sure, because you can't sell a car solely based on also 'available in red'. So they understand that we aren't all mechanics, but Pharma wants to think we are all doctors... Sound like a problem to you? Me too.

Even more entertaining is this article from Natural News in which Zoloft™ was equally effective against depression as the Placebo was. I am suddenly thinking of asking my pharmacist for a prescription of Placebo™ with instructions to consume liberally anytime I'm feeling a bit off, with or without alcohol, food, water, or other narcotics (legal or otherwise). For all I know it will prevent cancer, cure the common cold and give me a permanent erection while I am at it... And why wouldn't it? If I can sufficiently program myself to believe these effects are due to a regiment of popping fake pills, my psyche might even do the rest for me.

Sidebar: some personal experience (or lack thereof) with Zoloft™

I was prescribed Zoloft™ by a psychologist during the initial phases of my divorce... Of course I was depressed, my marriage was failing, things didn't feel right, I was anxious, nervous, feeling the weight of sadness, no longer enjoyed things I once loved, and due to my inability to sleep longer than about 45 minutes at a time, I was also exhausted. Wow, I felt exactly like unhappy blob guy... But, I am not one to blindly do something, so I looked into the side effects, then promptly cancelled any future appointments threw out the prescription and cured myself the old fashioned way: get sloberingly drunk, hit on all female bar staff and female patrons every other day for 2~3 weeks until I just felt like vomiting for 3 days... Maybe it was more expensive than Zoloft and psychiatry, but it was also more fun, and I stopped feeling alone upon realizing other people spent as much time in this dive drinking their sorrows away as I did. It was actually a bit unsettling how many other regulars this small hole in the wall had.

There were many sad stories in that place, and yet a very common back-story. All of these regulars had in some way failed to achieve or failed to keep the 'White Picket Fence' pipe-dream of normalcy. Whatever the story was, they were dodging life because they felt they had in some way failed at it. Who put that image in their heads that this is life, and you are over there outside the graph? Well, these days, everybody, but it started a long time ago and the biggest propagators of the lie are the very same media and advertizing companies that created unhappy-blob-guy who sells Zoloft™.

Why are they so consumed with curing the depression that they probably created in the first place? Because there's money to be made. Do you think (even for a millisecond) that if somebody created a pill that cured cancer or AIDS that we'd ever hear about it? No, because that would eliminate all the profits that they reap in trying to help us live longer (expensive pills for years, not months) while still actually dying from some incurable disease. In fact based on many things I have read about how quickly drugs get rushed to market with little to no oversight, I am convinced that pills for our discomfort are all spiked with something that will cause cancer given enough of a dosage.

Retrospectively, if the possible side-effects of my cancer curing pills was depression, I would take them and deal with being sad...

-DIrtyKID©