Beware of TV pitchmen diagnosing illnesses across the airwaves

ABOUT a year ago, in the middle of a TV sports report in Florida watched by the man in my life, up popped the inventor of the Jarvik artificial heart.

If you don’t remember the Jarvik artificial heart, join the club. If memory serves, it was a yoke that kept people going while they awaited a transplant.

The inventor announced himself and I thought he was going to tell us all about his gadget. Not so. He was on the box to plug a heart medication. (It seemed fair to infer that his machine hadn’t been the panacea for all cardiac ills.) He split in two and started talking to himself, which was even more confusing. One bit of him was worried about side-effects. The other bit was poo-pooing said side effects. At the end of the ad, up came the brand name and the manufacturer’s logo. It was such a great ad, I wanted some of the drug straight away, even though my heart gets on with its job in a most workpersonlike way.

The longing had gone off me when a couple of days later, a film star from the 1950s appeared. She looked like a bar of soap left too long in water. You could just about make out who she had once been, but everything about her was puffed and slightly melted. She, like the Jarvik heart man, was plugging a product, but in such much more coded terms.

Not so long ago, she confessed, she’d almost abandoned her career and her social life, because of this problem she had. At first, I thought it was slipping dentures. You get a lot of slipping dentures in Florida, because so many older people go there to live. Well, I assume that’s why it’s such a prevalent problem. Not that I’ve met a Floridian-slipping denture up close and personal. It’s just the ad breaks have them slipping all over the place, to the sound of agonised Stravinski discord in the background. Then the music softens into harmony as the picture shows an upper denture having squidgy glue squeezed onto it in a fat worm. The voiceover announces that the fat worm works for 18 hours and tastes like peppermint. Final shot shows the denture-wearer enthralling other guests at a barbeque with charming smalltalk and fearlessly biting into an apple.

The problem from which she had suffered, before the intervention of the medication she was plugging, was stress incontinence.

“What possessed her to put herself out in front of that?” I asked Himself.

He looked at me blankly. I think his brain goes into Hibernate mode during the ad breaks so that he can be fully committed to every flying ball in the sports broadcasts and remember who beat Antrim in the minor semi-final in 1947. He had totally missed out on this re-cycled celeb (literally; the final shot had her cycling up a hill, surrounded by merry friends) and her historic problem.

No ailment is too embarrassing for some famous person to claim in a TV commercial in the US. Former presidential candidate Bob Dole flogged an erectile dysfunction product. He did it with a lot more style and humour than he had brought to the presidential campaign, too. But then, that wouldn’t be hard.

The common thread running through all the commercials selling prescription drugs or surgical procedures is a cheery crassness, extending to one elegant woman in her late 60s, who tells viewers about one-day eye surgery which restored her vision after years of fuzziness. She praises the eye surgeon to the skies, saying that he’s simply the best.

The eye surgeon, in scrubs with a surgical mask hanging like a necklace under his chin, lest we fail to get the message that he is the surgeon, puts his arm around her shoulder and says “But of course you’d say that, Mom.” I’d always thought surgeons didn’t operate on their own families, but this guy poked around inside his Mom’s eye without a qualm. She doesn’t seem to have had a qualm, either. Maybe there’s a family discount.

Members of the US Congress, on the other hand, have more than a qualm about this kind of advertising. Some Congressmen have been lobbied by parents who don’t want to be asked by their six-year-old to explain male urinary urgency because an ad for its amelioration appears on prime time TV.

The concerns of others go further. They are worried that these ads are fundamentally changing the relationship between patient and doctor by not only sending people to their doctors demanding specific drugs, but possibly stimulating them to self-diagnose ailments that may or may not exist, and from which they may or may not suffer.

Democrat Jerry Nadler from New York is just one of the legislators seeking to either control or ditch direct-to-consumer commercials.

“You should not be going to a doctor saying ‘I have restless legs syndrome’ – whatever the hell that is – or going to a doctor saying ‘I have the mumps,’” Mr Nadler says. “You should not be diagnosed by a TV pitchman who doesn’t know you.”

He has a point. On the other hand, some consumers approve of the ads, saying that the way they explain the side-effects of some of the drugs they plug can alert patients on those prescriptions to dangers which might not otherwise surface until their next visit to a doctor, several months down the line.

We don’t have such advertising in Ireland, although a version of them, cast as public health education, is creeping onto the airwaves in recent times. You know the ones where one member of the public murmurs about a problem to a pal who immediately says that help is at hand from their GP. No crude mention is made of any specific product, although, at the end of the ad, a voice announces that this is health education provided by the Buggins Corporation. Buggins, of course, make the leading brand medication used to treat the problem mentioned. It’s all perfectly legal and is undoubtedly subject to rigorous rules. It would be interesting, though, to know how many GPs find patients pitching up in their surgeries, asking for treatment as a result of these low-key advertisements.

While it’s unlikely that TV commercials like those in Florida will ever be permitted in Ireland, it’s surprising how many people would approve their introduction, on the basis that anything which demystifies medicine and adds to the free choice of the consumer is a good thing.

However, the real problem about them is that they medicalise perfectly normal human traits like shyness, and create new “illnesses.”

The latest of those new ailments is “eyelash deficiency.” This is not alopecia, a serious problem which eliminates all the sufferer’s eyelashes and eyebrows. This “illness” takes the form of thin eyelashes.

Now, we’d all love to have an oversupply of fat eyelashes. But eyelash deficiency as an illness? Maybe we’d have bought that concept back when we were rich and foolish. These days, we’re too poor for that kind of nonsense. Cheap mascara, repeatedly applied, may not cure this “illness.” But it’s not bad at controlling the symptoms.