It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
We've recently reported on subliminal ads on TV, but the constant barrage of advertisements for new medicines are anything but subtle! Do the prescription drug ads we see on TV make us think we're sick when we're not? These ads are part of the new "empowered patient" movement, which means that doctors have lost some of their professional clout when it comes to making diagnoses and prescribing treatment—is this good or bad?
Psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl thinks that these ads amplify people's cultural expectations, or even change them—for instance, erectile dysfunction drug ads that are featured prominently at sporting events as well as on TV play to men's perceptions of what it is to be a normal, healthy man. The same goes for antidepressant ads showing women who are able to fulfill their roles and duties as mothers only when they are taking pills.
Studies have shown that patients who go to their doctors and ask for a medicine they saw in an advertisement are likely to get it—which is part of the reason the blitz of ads has escalated every year since the US Food & Drug Administration relaxed the rules for them in 1997. The fact that physicians themselves are exposed to the same ads means that they may be influenced too.
If you want to stay healthy, get plenty of blue apples!
www.unknowncountry.com...
The advertising practices of drug companies are so outrageous that even David Kessler, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, penned an editorial condemning them. In fact, Kessler says television ads never should have been allowed by the FDA in the first place (the FDA legalized drug ads in late 1997, after Kessler left his position there). Today, the United States is the only industrialized nation in the world to allow drug ads on television.
By 1903, 1 out of every 500 people in the United States is hospitalized for mental illness.
By 1955, roughly one out of every 300 people was disabled by mental illness.
From 1955 to 1987, roughly one out of every 75 persons are deemed disabled mentally ill.
Now it’s one in every 50 Americans disabled by mental illness.
The number of mentally disabled people in the United States has been increasing at the rate of 150,000 people per year since 1987. That's an increase every day over the last 17 years of 410 people per day newly disabled by mental illness.
Combined spending on antipsychotic drugs and antidepressants jumped from around $500 million in 1986 to nearly $20 billion in 2004. So we raise the question: Is the use of these drugs somehow actually fueling this increase in the number of the disabled mentally ill?
Originally posted by Funkydung
sometimes i will ask a simple question about things like this where i work and sadly its like im speaking in a different language. deer in the headlight look. im afraid that there is no stopping this part of the beast. too big.
Originally posted by annestacey
Originally posted by Funkydung
sometimes i will ask a simple question about things like this where i work and sadly its like im speaking in a different language. deer in the headlight look. im afraid that there is no stopping this part of the beast. too big.
Yes I get that too. And I work with VERY intelligient people. When I tell them about this stuff, they just laugh and say... yeah it's a "conspiracy".
I figure if they want to be the sheeple herded into oblivion, the hell with 'em. I choose to pay attention to what's going on around me.
Originally posted by Benevolent Heretic
This is really an important subject. Most of the older people I know (and I mean over 40) are on three or four meds for various ailments. And the older people are on 10 or 12.
I'm totally sick of the pharmaceutical industry. It is huge and (I'm sure) in bed with the government, as annestacey says. (great sources!)
For this reason alone, getting more members on ATS is a Good Thing.
And for a little satirical comic relief:
FLAG this thread!
[edit on 24-3-2007 by Benevolent Heretic]