By Merlin Lessler —<\/p>\n
If you watch regular TV, or even streaming TV, you can\u2019t escape a barrage of ads for prescription drugs. I used to think of drug dealers as guys in back alleys, wearing topcoats, selling heroin.<\/p>\n
Now, it\u2019s pharmaceutical companies on TV pushing legal drugs; some are worse for you than the illegal ones. A lot of the supplements can have adverse effects too, or be of little value, but they aren\u2019t required by the FDA to warn of the side effects. <\/p>\n
My main problem with these ads, as an old coot, is with prescription drugs. I watch the ad promo, but I also listen to the list of possible side effects. It\u2019s hard because they are accompanied by wonderful but distracting imagery. I may not even take the medicine, but I still experience many of the side effects. I get all the bad and none of the good. If old age had been advertised when I was young, with the possible side effects, I would have been better prepared.<\/p>\n
It should have been a subject in high school, along with the side effects of credit card use and other real-life skills. Kids can parrot the state capitals, but can they explain how compound interest can compromise their lifestyle? Or that they will have to pay a plumber $100 to clean the screen in a faucet that they could do in two minutes themselves? <\/p>\n
I started writing this article to complain that I have some of the side effects of medicines I don\u2019t even take; I ended up complaining about the lack of practical life skills in our school classrooms. I never know where this pen will take me when I sit down to write an article. It\u2019s something Miss Foley, my high school English teacher, never taught me, but apparently taught Rod Serling, creator of the Twilight Zone, who was her student too, 18 years before I sat in the back of her classroom.<\/p>\n
If she had, or if I had paid attention, you wouldn\u2019t have to suffer when my article wanders all over the place. Or maybe it\u2019s just an old coot thing.<\/p>\n
And no, I\u2019m not comparing myself to Rod Serling, just the opposite. <\/p>\n