Personally, I don't think pharmaceutical companies should be allowed to advertise. It is far too twisted a concept to allow companies to advertise for "Unhappiness." Sometimes people get sad about shit. You don't need a pill for it. People are like conceptual sponges, and so much airtime dedicated to the advertising of diseases results in an overmedicated hypochondriac culture. There is one commercial in particular I find hilarious, though. It is for restless leg syndrome, and most of the commercial is dedicated to the statement "This is actually a real disease." If your advertisement has to spend that much time justifying the existence of the disease you are purported to be curing, you have a problem.
Similarly, I was at the optometrist the other day, so, for wont of better reading material, I started to flip through Web M.D. magazine. Yes, such a thing exists. A magazine for a website that is essentially a series of medical product advertisements. Even aside from being a weird, third-derivative critique on what our society deems worthy of cutting down trees and putting ink all over them, the magazine itself was godawful. Here are the headlines, as nearly verbatim as I can remember:
Insomiac: Are you one?
Cholesterol: Diet and exercise not doing it?
Heart Disease: America's number one killer?
Diseases You Have Never Heard Of: Do you have any?
Seriously, all the magazine had was a list of ailments with checklists attached. By self-diagnosis, I apparently am going to die of a quadruple heart attack / simultaneous bout of west nile virus / impetigo within hours. Unless, of course, I employ the services of Web M.D. to get me in contact with a qualified physician who can prescribe me all manner of potent elyxers.
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