Ask your doctor about TV ads

It’s outrageous that Big Pharma keeps filling our living rooms with TV commercials for pharmaceuticals. Profits for Pharma, profits for TV industry, bad for your health.

All of the United Nation’s 193 countries forbid this manipulation — except the U.S. and New Zealand. Over 7 billion people agree with me.

Why? As Elizabeth Barrett Browning once put it, “Let me count the ways.”

Examples for starters: Healthcare costs. Generics suppression. Pressures on doctors. Costs of advertising. Unnecessary prescriptions. Off-label use. Side effects confusion.

For detail on a couple more:

1. One of the most effective ways of increasing Big Pharma’s global sales of $1.48 trillion, while decreasing Americans’ health, is to pound away on our television screens the message that only pills will enable our tiptoeing along the tulips-lined path to health. What a bucket of toenail clippings that is!

The law requires recitation of side effects. But coming at you with the frequency of a crazed woodpecker attacking a tree, amid the deliberate diversions of dozens of scampering squirrels on the screen?

Google “What will reduce your chances of getting cancer, a heart attack, high blood pressure, diabetes, dementia or other serious diseases — while increasing years of quality life?”

Notice how few answers involve pills? Notice the overlap in recommendations — regardless of the disease?

You and I hold the keys to our pill-free longevity, health and happiness. Foods like fruits and vegetables, movement and exercise (150 minutes a week rather than recliner hours), regular sound sleep (7-8 hours rather than all-nighters), vaccinations, weight control (track your BMI), social time (face-to-face, smartphones pocketed), stress reduction, no tobacco and little alcohol.

It's not the law, it’s your choice. Only take what your doctor prescribes. Ignore pharma’s pricey pills promotions. Save your money. Create your own health.

2. Why does Big Pharma spend a billion a month advertising pills to people who can’t legally buy them? Ever thought about that? We can’t buy this stuff without a doctor’s prescription.

It’s like manufacturers putting TV commercials for toys in children’s programs. Few children in that audience can afford them. But manufacturers profit off the free child labor that will pester parents.

Similarly, Big Pharma’s TV ads are the drug pushers’ effort to profit off free adult labor pestering doctors.

3. “It’s all about the money.” There are many providers of products and services, capitalist competitors with prices regulated by “the market,” who well serve the public. But there are essentials, such as housing and health care, for which charging an unregulated, profit-maximizing price is unacceptable. Especially when Americans must pay for a drug 8 times the price charged in Turkey, as taxpayers pay half the total pharmaceutical research costs, and Big Pharma keeps all the profits.

In the spirit of “All the News That Fits We Print,” this is only a sample. Want more? Ask your doctor.

Nicholas Johnson was former co-director of the Iowa Institute for Health, Behavior and Environmental Policy. Contact mailbox@nicholasjohnson.org