As Seen On TV
I’m retired. One of the “benefits” of retirement, is that I get to watch more TV than I did while I was working. And one of the things I’ve noticed is that there are an awful lot of commercials for “niche” pharmaceuticals. What’s a “niche” pharmaceutical? So here’s an example: Vanda is a drug used by blind people who are suffering from Non-24 syndrome. That’s when they lose the normal sleep cycle of night and day, because they don’t experience light and dark.
Now that’s got to be a huge issue for them, In a world that’s set up on a day/night cycle. And I’m very glad they’ve found a drug that can help. But Vanda is running a national ad campaign on television to let blind people know about the medication. How many totally blind people are watching TV? And how many of them are suffering from Non-24 Syndrome? How much money does that pharmaceutical company have – that they can pay for a national ad campaign to maybe reach the 65,000 to 95,000 who are estimated to suffer from this disorder?
Writing Prescriptions
And another thing about all that. Why are those companies “selling” drugs for very specific cancers, auto-immune diseases, and asthma caused by a specific protein? Isn’t determining what drug is more effective up to the doctors who specialize in those issues? Why are pharmaceuticals campaigning “over” the specialists heads directly to the patients?
There’s a simple answer to that last question. The companies want the patients to go into the doctor and tell them they want that specific drug. And the doctors may well write a prescription for that specific drug, because the patient wants it. Clearly that must happen a lot, otherwise the pharmaceuticals’ wouldn’t pay the incredibly high price per patient for a national advertising campaign.
Which brings us to the larger point of this essay. We are being trained to become our own “experts”. We are being told what specific cancer treatment to use, and then to go to our oncologist and get it. The commercial says we can reduce our psoriatic reactions, and improve our eosinophilic asthma symptoms. We are becoming “the experts”, instead of the real experts we pay, who have a decade or more of schooling and practice in the field. Who cares what the doctor says: the commercial on TV says this will work.
Rocket Science
And this “expertization” of America bleeds over into our current national health crisis – Covid. The Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines are MRNA vaccines. That’s a technique developed over the past two decades to “fool” our immune systems into creating anti-bodies against a virus without exposing it to the actual virus itself. Unlike the flu vaccine, where we are exposed to a weak or killed dose of the actual flu, MRNA vaccines stimulate antibody creation by simulating the proteins a virus uses to attach itself to cells, but not the virus itself.
And if that’s not a clear enough explanation, that’s no surprise. It’s not rocket science, it’s even worse: molecular biology. But how many Americans today have decided for themselves that the molecular biologists are “wrong”? And even worse, many Americans are listening to “experts”, dressed in white lab coats, who really don’t have expertise at all in this area of science.
Fix Your Own Car
I used to work on cars. Back in the day, I tore my 1967 Volkswagen Squareback engine apart. I even put the pistons in the oven, and the wrist pins in the freezer before I re-assembled them. Mom was definitely NOT HAPPY when she walked in and found that. I wasn’t an expert, in fact I was using the manual – “How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive for the Compleat Idiot” (you can still find a copy of that – $301 on Amazon!). It was fun, but it was also necessary. I couldn’t pay for the repairs, so I had to do it myself.
The rebuild worked, and I drove the Squareback until the floor boards rusted out. But when I pop the hood on our 2011 Chevy Silverado pickup truck, it’s difficult to even find familiar landmarks. Modern engines are a balance between electronic controls and traditional engine parts, all adjusted by a computer “brain”. It’s not even in the “ballpark” of this “Compleat Idiot”, and I hire a professional to maintain and fix it.
And that’s car mechanics, not molecular biology. I wouldn’t ignore my professional about the Silverado, so why would I ignore the world’s leading virologists, like Dr. Fauci about the Covid vaccine? The answer for some: I heard it on TV, or a podcast, or I read it on FACEBOOK – so it must be true. And that all starts with those wonderful ads on television, telling me about how to fix my asthma, or extend my life with cancer, or how to sleep while blind. We’ve all become “experts”.
