Drug company advertising, direct to consumers, opinions?
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Our Daily Meds
How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs
Doctors call it the resurrection drug. They have watched as it freed patients from what seemed an inescapable death.
The medicine treats sleeping sickness, a disease far more lethal and terrifying than its name implies. Opportunistic tsetse flies spread the disease through much of Africa, devastating villages and killing tens of thousands of people a year. The jewel-eyed yellowish brown flies thrive in thickets along rivers where women and children go to collect water. With a bite, the bloodsuckers inject deadly parasites into their human victims. As the parasites multiply, their human hosts appear to go mad. The victims grow agitated and confused, slur their speech, and stumble. Finally come coma and death.
The pharmaceutical company that manufactured the medicine, a failed cancer drug with the tongue-twisting name eflornithine, abandoned it in 1995, seeing no profit in selling it in poor countries.
But the resurrection drug made its own revival a few years later—not in Africa, but in the United States, a land free of tsetse flies but with fourteen million women worried about unwanted facial hair. Another company began selling it in the form of a depilatory cream to minimize female mustaches. With its lavender-colored logo resembling a graceful swan and advertisements sporting young, beautiful models, eflornithine became another prescription drug marketing success.
Well, chronic dry eye is a problem, it all depends on perspective. Some of these issues are dramatised by the pharmaceutical companies though. But I know whenever I have had dry eyes I couldn't function that day. If I had to deal with it on a daily or even weekly basis I woul probably be looking for some sort of medical treatment.
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