On Prescription Drug Advertising

At exactly 6:48 PM EST during the NBC Nightly News every evening, a Cialis commercial airs.  It’s not late-night television, or even primetime, but please TV announcer, get those older men prepared.  That way, when they are asked “when the moment is right, will you be ready?” the next time, they will be ready.  The people watching the news are probably just finishing dinner: a perfect time to send a message about erectile dysfunction and maintaining libido to families, children, and other viewers on a daily basis.  They will really appreciate the information.

Prescription drug advertisements are wasting Americans’ time and senses.  Half of the time or space of every commercial tells us what side effects a medicine has that we need to watch out for and why we shouldn’t take the drug in the first place.  Spending all this energy to inform consumers just how terrible that drug really is, though, is intentional: the FDA requires each ad to “present the benefits and risks of a prescription drug in a balanced fashion.”  However, if all those risks are true (and how could they be false if they’re presented on TV?), then why tell us about the drug in the first place?  We can’t prescribe our own medicines, nor can we diagnose our own illnesses—we leave those jobs to doctors (for now, at least).  So, maybe these ads have a place in health-professions-only journals and television channels, but certainly not in our living rooms, during our dinners, or in our newspapers with our morning coffee.

Only recently did it become easier for pharmaceutical companies to advertise such prescription drugs to American consumers.  The FDA relaxed its rules restricting such direct-to-consumer advertisement of prescription drugs in 1997, making requirements for the information about side effects and contraindications less strict, and a new era began.  Big Pharma increased their spending on these television commercials astronomically ($4.9 billion was spent in 2007), and Americans have been increasingly bombarded with disease and drug information since. 

This increased advertising has led to an increase in hypochondriac-like behavior in the United States.  By being constantly slapped in the face with information about rheumatoid arthritis, depression, and most recently atrial fibrillation (AFib, as the commercial calls it), it’s not unlikely for television viewers to start questioning their own health.  One classic Zoloft commercial, with the sad face stuck under a rain cloud that can’t even smile when a cute blue bird comes by to be his friend, describes symptoms of depression in an undertone voice, making you, the viewer, feel depressed just watching and listening!  Halfway through the commercial, a jazzy clarinet tune has begun, the sad face is happy and can bounce around the screen and has made friends with the blue bird (he’s not lonely any more).  During this joy-filled segment of the commercial, the narrator describes the risks associated with taking the medicine, the possible side effects (enough to make anyone not want to take Zoloft), and instructs the listener to talk to their doctor.  The narrator is happier during this description, or at least more upbeat than when he described the depression symptoms earlier, making you think that if you take Zoloft, you’ll instantly be restored from a depressive, mopey, and lonely blob into a happy, carefree, spirited soul, despite being sick from the side effects.  The final scene of the commercial confidently states the drug’s slogan that is actually applicable, describing Big Pharma’s goal in their drug marketing plans: “When you know more about what’s wrong, you can help make it right.” 

That is the goal, of course: educate consumers about the combination of symptoms related to a disease or disorder that can be treated with one of Company X’s fabulous drugs.  However, there’s a difference between educating consumers about their health and giving them the agency to choose health care and treatments that are right for them versus instructing patients to demand specific prescriptions from their doctors and, if denied that medicine for whatever reason, finding another doctor who will give them that drug.  One study found that direct-to-consumer advertising of drugs treating high cholesterol is “effective in generating new patient visits” (Liu and Gupta, 2011).  So, people see such drug advertisements and decide they need to go to a doctor, as they have that disease or health problem described and need relief that only the drug they saw can provide.  That doesn’t mean that all people who see these commercials and decide they need that drug actually know they will be diagnosed with that particular problem or disease that the drug treats.  Some people see commercials for anti-depressants and start thinking they are depressed and need that drug so they can be happy, when really they are just having a bad day: when they wake up tomorrow or next week, they will feel better.  There’s a reason that doctors spend eight years in school after high school and three to seven more years on top of that training in their specialty, and that reason is not to train them to give patients whatever they want simply because they saw it on television.  People whose legs wiggle around when they are idly sitting do not all necessarily have restless leg syndrome, they may just have developed the motion out of habit.  In the same grain, prescription drug advertising is not an effective way to educate Americans about health and disease.

(word count: 900) 

(Cited article can be found here)

Laura Kipnis' essay "Against Love" conveys the feeling many people experience after ending a relationship: "we...feel like failures when love dies." But how do you know what love is unless you fail first?

Without that feeling of failure when things don't work out, there is no way to genuinely appreciate a relationship that works: how do you know when love is really love otherwise? You don't know what your needs are, you don't know what needs you can fulfill as a partner, you don't know what works (or, what works well) unless you start off with something that doesn't work quite right. You need trial and error to figure those things out about yourself and to find another person who complements you so that love can develop. 

So, put yourself out there!  Don't let yourself be deterred by "uncoupling as an experience of crisis and inadequacy." Without risking potential failure, you may never find that one person who complements you perfectly, who you'd do anything to make happy, and who would do anything to make you happy, even if they are right under your nose waiting for you. 

Imitating Susan Allen Toth and David Sedaris

In each of my imitation pieces, I attempted to match the style and tone each author used.  I picked stories from my own life that I could tell using one of my chosen authors' voices, as I was most concerned about not directly copying the author's words or voice exactly but instead to mimic it.  I tried to use similar sentence lengths, styles, voice (active or passive), focus, and distance between the author and the essay in my imitations as appropriate.

My first imitation piece is based on Susan Allen Toth's essay "Going to the Movies." Her voice in this piece heavily leans on summary and scene with very little reflection. It seems as if Toth as the author is very distant from the text and events at hand despite her direct involvement in the scene, as her opinions are almost completely absent from the majority of the essay. I also tried to use active voice and a shorter sentence style with minimal adjectives. This part of imitating Toth was especially difficult for me. My writing voice tends to use passive verbs and tenses, many adjectives, and I hate using too many short sentences. In my imitation I talk about eating dinner with different people, just as Toth describes going to the movies with different people. It feels like I'm not including the details I would normally include in such a story, but in Toth's style I feel there isn't room for those details, except in very brief and vivid depictions of minute scenes using a minimal number of words. One thing I found especially helpful in imitating Toth was to re-read her essay multiple times and to copy out (by hand) various passages of the essay to internalize the stylistic components necessary to her voice.

My second imitation is based on David Sedaris' essay "Me Talk Pretty One Day." In this essay, Sedaris seems to describe scenes in vivid detail with intermixed reflections on and interpretations of the scene. He uses lots of dialogue, a conversational and colloquial tone, and undercut punch-lines following dramatic buildup. Sedaris also avoids parentheses like the plague, but uses commas instead to group ideas, which is very different from my natural writing style that employs a mix of these two strategies. My imitation's subject is medical school admissions and interview trips. It was difficult for me to sense whether or not I was overdoing the humor or not as I wrote the essay, but I read each paragraph out loud after I wrote it. This helped me realize whether or not the humor was working, and I frequently stopped myself halfway through sentences to rewrite them. Another strategy I used was to write following a continuous train of thought, which helped me reach the humor and very specific situations that I find characteristic of Sedaris. He is one of my favorite authors, and I have read many of his books of essays. This background made it easier for me to pick out parts of his writing style that are specifically his and helped me to better match that style.

Writing Process

When someone asks me what I'd like to be doing, I'll usually choose something like sleeping, talking, hanging out with people, reading something about science, playing my piccolo in the band at hockey or football games, etc.. Notice the task absent from that list: writing. While reading the written word is something I've always been fond of, formal writing of any sort has never been something I've enjoyed. I'm hoping this class will help me break down that mental block!


My writing process in one word: handwriting. Pen on lined notebook paper. Scribbling, writing all over the margins of the paper, circling chunks of text and drawing an arrow to insert that chunk somewhere else, circling an asterisk that links a chunk I wrote in the top white space to go into that spot since there wasn't otherwise room to fit it. All that is the real key to any of my more successful writing endeavors. If I start my work typing on the computer, I'm doomed for failure before I've even started. I also like to write early in the morning post-caffeine or later at night when I tell myself it's now or never. Sometimes I write chunks of my essay that I outlined out of order, especially skipping over the introduction and conclusion. Taking mental breaks is another necessary component of my writing process to avoid exhaustion and self-defeating attitudes about what I'm writing.


For something more interesting, here's a photo of the Michigan Marching Band, the best part of my college experience, doing what we do best!

(photo credit to MMBPhotoVideo.com)