This week's surprising news

Every so often some "news report" comes out with "shocking new information" that turns out to be neither news, new, or shocking. For instance, someone does something unbelievably stupid and later it turns out they were drunk or stoned. Uh, yeah, who saw that one coming? Or it is "revealed" that people who eat a lot of sugar are at risk for diabetes. Noooooooo.....really? Did you figure that out all on your own or did it require years of research and millions of dollars? Well done.

Well, now we are at it again. Shocking new revelations are on board about the medication advertising that blankets television. Turns out that...now, be sure you are ready for this because this information will surprise you, it will shock you, it will amaze you, it will make you look at television and magazine advertising differently forever...this information is so shocking, so radically different from anything we had even conceived might be possible that you might find it hard to believe.

Are you ready for this? Make sure you are sitting down with pillows carefully arranged to the left and right in case you should faint at the shock and pitch out of your chair. We must be safe.

Ads for medication may overpromise benefits. What? You mean that something with side-effects like dizziness, loss of consciousness, death, 4 hour erections, bleeding, nausea, death, explosive diarrhea, and worse...like, you know, death....you mean to tell me something that might cause those things is not going to instantaneously and automatically turn my life from a train wreck into perfection replete with gorgeous spouse, toned physique, plenteous monetary resources and an idyllic homestead in a pastoral setting? I find that hard to believe.

I think what is hard to believe is that people believe in the alleged benefits of these medicines to the point where these ads are skyrocketing purchases of these products.

Here is another "news flash". We don't know that much about the human body. Medicines to "fix" one problem inevitably cause other problems...including some that are worse than the one being fixed. If the point of medicine is, as one reasonably well informed, medically speaking, to rebalance chemicals in the body and if them being out of sync is causing the problems you are experiencing then it stands to reason that when you rebalance them...unless you are careful, your new concoction might imbalance them in other ways. Of course, medicos and drug companies will argue they ARE being careful....I would argue not careful enough since the side effects occur often enough...and are serious enough...that they have to warn against them.

I suspect, and I am really going out on a limb here, that part of the reason is they are shotgunning the solution...using one generic solution for thousands of unique genetic make-ups. Hence the solution that corrects the imbalance in say...a 40 year old iron man athlete is slightly different than the 22 year old living on Big Macs and french fries. I am just brainstorming here, but something tells me their physiologies might be just different enough that what works for one might, just might, be disastrous for the other.

In other "news", I have said it before and I will say it again; at some point in the not to distant future, certainly within the next 200 years, "modern medical theory" will laugh at the "backwards savages" who thought putting poison into the body was a good idea (chemotherapy). It is too bad there are not signs we could see today that would demonstrate this to be so...stuff like chemo patients vomiting, losing their hair, demonstrating physical weakness to the point of being unable to even walk. But of course none of that ever happens...but someday we will get "shocking news" that this wasn't such a good idea...