Editorial: There's A Pill For That

Posted: 2020-09-23 10:41:37 By: thebay


The pharmaceutical industry spends a lot of time and money trying to convince healthy people that we’re sick, because us feeling sick is what keeps them in business.

As we flip through magazines, we see full page and even multi-page ads (one page of which is usually disclaimers) from drug companies offering medication for any health complaint we can imagine.  Trivial symptoms are blown out of proportion, creating disease out of the normal ups and downs of everyday life, and then a drug is offered to cure them.  Going bald?  Use Minoxidil.  PMS (now called “premenstrual dysphoric disorder”)?  Prozac will get us through it.  Osteoporosis is treated with drugs instead of just adding calcium and vitamin D to our diets.  Shyness is now a sign of “social anxiety disorder” that calls for Zoloft, and Ritalin is the answer if our kids are too rambunctious.

The state of our health is an emotional issue for many of us, and pharmaceutical companies take advantage of this with ads and health information that put ideas into our heads that wouldn’t occur to us otherwise.  Get your cholesterol and bone density checked.  Think about hormone replacement therapy.  Talk to your doctor about antidepressants for your anxiety.  Common complaints become frightening conditions, scaring us into taking drugs for non-existent diseases.  Even being “at risk” of an illness now requires “preventative” medication. 

I’m not suggesting that the pharmaceutical industry hasn’t worked miracles in the last 50 years.  They’ve developed drugs for cancer, HIV, clinical depression and other life-threatening conditions, drugs that have improved and prolonged our lives.  But at the end of the day, it’s a for-profit industry.  Developing cures would be detrimental to their cash flow.  Healing people is not a sustainable business model.

Best way to make money?  Develop drugs that cure nothing yet promote long-term use and dependency.

Like fentanyl.

-Ruby Truax