Drug ads sell disease

Check out an insightful csmonitor.com article on how drug ads sell sickness to promote their products.

The article reports that in the effort of pharmaceutical companies to create new disease markets, they’re frightening people into taking more prescriptions than they may need. "We're increasingly turning normal people into patients," said Dr. Lisa M. Schwartz of the Dartmouth Medical School. "The ordinary experiences of life become a diagnosis, which makes healthy people feel like they're sick."

Here’s another interesting development I didn’t realize:

“…more than 200 medical school professors recently called for an end to prescription drug ads….” This is cool!

We may have healthier airwaves yet!

Pill pushers

Have you noticed how aggressively pharmaceutical companies have been pushing their pills?

Forbes magazine claims Big Pharma’s focus is more market-driven than ever. Billions are spent on ad campaigns aimed at convincing consumers they need more medicine. Drug firms have hired nearly 100,000 salespeople to call on physicians to sell their product. A drug is advocated for every ill, it seems, and not just for traditional physical ailments, but also for lifestyle issues.

For the consumer striving to live a happy healthy life, it’s essential to defend one’s thought from the aggressive campaigns of drug companies. Many ads are designed to impress a viewer’s mind with graphic images of disease, and create fear in their thought. The unsuspecting ad-reader may wonder if they have a disease they never would have dreamed having if it weren’t for the ad.

Mary Baker Eddy understood the deleterious effects of advertising disease. She wrote, “The press unwittingly sends forth many sorrows and diseases among the human family. It does this by giving names to diseases and by printing long descriptions which mirror images of disease distinctly in thought. A new name for an ailment affects people like a Parisian name for a novel garment. Every one hastens to get it. A minutely described disease costs many a man his earthly days of comfort. What a price for human knowledge!”

One way to protect ourselves is to not watch or read medical ads in the first place. This is easier to say than do at times! Leafing through Parade magazine or watching the evening news requires constant diligence to pass over and tune out the undesirable content. But no one else will do it for us. We need to take the initiative and keep our mental house free of descriptions of disease if we wish to keep the diseases out of our experience.

Focus on health, and not on disease, makes it easier to maintain a health-consciousness. Health is a spiritual gift from God, and we find more of it through using our spiritual senses,--tuning into Truth and filling thought with spiritual images of love and harmony.

So, when the next ad toting disease and pills hits your mental airwaves, block it out. Tune into Truth and know you are well under God’s constant care.

Spiritual mindedness is the best medicine around. It’s a prescription that keeps us healthy and also spares our savings.