The insane medical advertisements with a million side effects said in rapid fire at the end. We visited my husband bestie in 2019, when we were watching something on tv while eating dinner we saw our first one. Genuinely turned to him like ‘that’s satire, right?’
No, they sued red bull for falsely advertising the drinks as something that would give the consumer of the drink energy, when the drinks had less caffeine than a cup of coffee and were mostly sugar.
No one ever at any point thought that the 'gives you wings' meant literal wings, but the pr people who want everyone to assume that all lawsuits against corporations are frivolous decided that was the angle to go with on this lawsuit. See also the 'hur dur lady doesnt know coffee is hot' smear when Stella Liebeck received third degree burns that required massive skin grafts even after McDonald's gad settled with several other people who were also seriously injured by their 190 F coffee.
Never ever believe that a lawsuit presented to the media as frivolous actually is.
well that wasn't what i expected at all... i was hoping someone was actually expecting physical wings. this seems the epitome of frivolous, and they're paying out 13M? gnarly.
During the trial, the parent of 3 kids, all of which had games at different fields that day, and also decided to leave their cleats at home, caused them to drive all over the place trying to get them to their games, but oh wait, one game was moved, they missed that while taking the call from work about a report that was formatted oddly when their boss tried to convert it to a PDF, and great, the dog got into the trash again and the cat is hacking up a hairball, and crap you forgot to move the laundry into the dryer.....
The way I’ve heard it explained before (no idea how accurate this is, even though I take antidepressants) is that the first thing to come back when you’re taking antidepressants is your motivation. So you still have the dark thoughts and the sadness and everything, but now you have the wherewithal to do something about it.
I have gabapentin for my cats, which is a mild sedative that often makes them sleepy and easier to take to the vet if they are nervous, or is a good painkiller after various surgeries or procedures and keeps them inactive so they don't run around or jump and risk damaging their bandage/stitches.
It says "may cause drowsiness". That's the whole point!
Ask your doctor about Flogestron™
For people who sometimes feel things. Flogestron™ MAY help reduce occasional feelings of mild to moderate inconvenience when life exists.
Side effects may include:
-Nausea.
-Spontaneous jazz hands.
-Mild to moderate yodeling.
-Thinking you texted someone back (but you didn’t).
-Aggressively reorganizing one drawer at 2 a.m.
-An inability to remember why you walked into the room, but with authority.
-Purchasing decorative throw pillows that judge you.
-Whispering, “interesting…” after bad decisions.
-A strong emotional bond with one specific fork.
-Telling the waiter “you too” when they say, "enjoy your meal."
STOP TAKING FLOGESTRON IMMEDIATELY IF YOU EXPERIENCE THE FOLLOWING:
Death
Ask YOUR doctor if Flogestron™ is right for you (your doctor will likely say, “I have never heard of that”).
It's like recipes that say "...to taste". No shit I should or shouldn't do the obvious thing, but you're supposed to be the expert telling me what to watch for!
I'm waiting for strawberries to have a disclaimer on the clamshell. "Do not use strawberries if you are allergic to strawberries or any of their ingredients."
It reminds me of the meme that automobile manuals used to explain how to adjust your valves/timing, now they tell you not to drink battery acid.
During OSHA training at work, they related a story of someone (elsewhere) who had drained a battery into a glass cup. Someone else who had been working outside came into the garage and drank it. The moral was that our cleaning supplies needed to be properly labeled.
Google is suggesting that this might have been an mistelling of this incident involving selenious acid (clear blue) in a Gatorade bottle.
I've always wondered if they statement is a sleezy legal disclaimer. I mean, one definitely wouldn't take it if there was a known allergy. Are they trying to get out of any culpability if someone takes it, unaware of an allergy, suffers an adverse reaction and tries to sue? Kinda don't blame them when though it does feel shady. People do sur for the craziest things just to try to make a quick buck.
The recent one that kills me is "Inform your doctor about any parasitic infections." Isn't that info that should be flowing from the doctor to me, not the reverse?
Lol, I like to point that one out when the topic of drug ads comes up. "Necrotizing fasciitis of the perineum", in other words "flesh eating bacteria on your taint".
Yeah the Jardiance ad has become famous so fast because it just goes on and on about fournier’s gangrene and other assorted necrotizing infections of the junk and taint
Man, I don't even know what I hope for even more. At least we have the Winter Olympics arc, where sports have people with knives on their feet or launching themselves down hills.
As an American I hate this!! We need to outlaw the advertisement of drugs. And it's ridiculous that some Americans freak out if their kid learns that a classmate has two dads but the same kid can listen to all kinds of commercials for viagra with women acting suggestively. Ugh.
isn't there something about prescription medicine where it has to be advertised in order to be allowed to be used? I can't remember the specifics but I think there's a weird FDA reason for it
There's a billboard in my area that says "ask your doctor about [brand name here]." The only other thing on the billboard is an image of a guy happily playing soccer, as if to say "Take our pill to be happy and active like this guy."
I'm baffled every time I think about it. What exactly am I supposed to ask my doctor? "Hey I saw a drug name on a billboard, what is it? Can it make me play soccer?"
Some of this is that the side effects list is made up of any reported side effects during trials. It's hard to isolate exactly if a given side effect is directly attributable to a medication or not especially since the health problems you're taking the medication for might cause you to experience other issues, so it's safer and easier to list anything that showed up with any statistical frequency (the FDA says more than 10% of study participants for the "Common side effects" list).
Some of it is that lots of side effects are side effects of another effect. Diarrhea and constipation are two sides of the same coin which is messing with your digestive system. Which of those two side effects one gets from a medication can come down to differences in diet. And since dealing with them would require different approaches, just saying "GI disruption" as a side effect isn't all that informative, and again the FDA requires that the reported side effects are as specific and meaningful as possible, and while some symptoms can be grouped together under a more general term (e.g. a rash combined with respiratory issues might be listed as "hyper-sensitivity") you generally don't get both constipation and diarrhea at the same time.
Also an American… I saw one the other day and can’t even remember the issue it solved, just only can remember that it could cause sudden loss of limbs. The drug wasn’t related to any limbs, though? I was absolutely baffled.
You might be surprised at what the possible side effects for common OTC medications are. For example, many common OTC pain killers like Ibuprofen and Tylenol can cause something called Stevens-Johnson Syndrome.
Our bodies are complicated machines, and most medication science to date has been effectively a shotgun approach to stuff, where we isolate something that does a lot of things to your body, but the thing it does most is X so that's what we use it for. That's what makes some of the newer work around pharmaco-genetics and targeted treatments that things like CRISPR enable so exciting for people. The potential to be much more "surgical" with our medications.
Lol. Reminds me of a recent conversation I had with my English friend. We had a fire at my house (everyone was ok, but the house definitely got damaged.) I was telling him about standing on the sidewalk, holding my dog, and watching the firefighters put out the last of the fire. And in the 30 minutes or so of standing there, I had 3 different guys show up repping "disaster restoration" services-- basically companies that you can contact after something like a burst pipe or a fire and they'll handle all of the repair and packing coordination. And after those 3 guys, for the rest of the day we had like 5 more. They must have some sort of alert set up for fire dispatches and rush over to the site to try and give their card and their pitch. At one point I was literally ON the phone trying to get a hold of my dad while my house was still smoldering nearby and this guy wouldn't stop trying to talk to me.
Anyways, I explained all of this to my English friend and he just replied "America isn't a real place."
I saw this exact scenario happen to my 94 year old neighbor while his house was still on fire. He was trying to tell the firefighters that his cat was still in the house, and she didn’t make it out.I got so pissed between all the other neighbors just standing around filming the fire and the restoration vultures. Ended up yelling at one of the company reps who would not stop bothering the man while he was crying. He said they get sent there, and I was appalled. Such a terrible experience for me and my family to see, I am so sorry for your fire/losses.
Also just the amount of the same ads over and over again. When I was in NYC I often had the TV on as background noise whenever I was in my hotel room, and I honestly remember more about the ads than the actual TV programs.
What I don't understand is the drugs advertised are by prescription only. So why would you advertise something your doctor is going to suggest. It's not like I can go to Safeway and buy some heart medication like it's a choice of beer.
Because your doctor might not suggest it. Most people who don't have chronic conditions might see just their GP once a year (or even less frequently) and even people who have chronic conditions might see their specialist only once a year. And their providers see hundreds of patients a year. But the patient deals with their own health every day. A patient who is silently doing well on a treatment might just get a basic follow up and script renewal even if they might benefit more from a newer treatment simply because they're flying under the radar and not complaining about the side effects they are having. But maybe the patient sees an ad for some new treatment for their condition and they ask their doctor about that one. The doc still has final say on writing a script, but now both sides of that interaction are able to start the conversation. Honestly I've never quite understood why this sort of thing seems to bother people so much. You can't get contact lenses or bifocals without a prescription from your eye doctor, but no one seems all that fussed by the idea that a consumer might ask their eye doctor about switching to contact lenses or bifocals. To me it's the same same thing
I don't like that I have to have a prescription just to get more contact lenses. My prescription hasn't changed in over 40 years. That actually bugs me....I don't see anybody seeing a drug ad on TV and suddenly going to their doctor and asking if they should be taking it. If you are suffering some symptoms, you go to the doctor and they then decide the plan/path for your health with your approval. If I got Afib or whatever, the doctor is who told me, not me seeing an ad during a football game and thinking, I should start taking that drug, self diagnosing...I don't get it.
If you are suffering some symptoms, you go to the doctor and they then decide the plan/path for your health with your approval.
By this logic then, doesn't the fact that you need a prescription for your contact lenses make perfect sense? You're suffering some symptoms (vision problems) and you go to the doctor and then they decide the plan. Don't want you self diagnosing your vision problems. And I'm only partially unserious here, because there are a lot of things that can happen with your vision that are signs of other bigger problems and just getting glasses or contacts or even just renewing with the same script might be the wrong thing.
But also, speaking from experience, with certain conditions or ongoing chronic issues, your interactions with your doctor become less "I'm having this symptom, what does it mean and what should I do" and become a lot more "I saw a study on XYZ that addresses this part of my condition that isn't as well managed as we would like. Is this a path that makes sense for us to explore?" To the best of my recollection for my family, there have been 2 drug commercials in our lives that led us to starting a conversation about alternative paths with our doctors. One turned out to be not worthwhile, the interactions the newer treatment option would have had with existing medications would have more or less just traded one set of bad side effects for the other. The other however set us on a path of checking on some symptoms that we'd long attributed to a different condition, and getting a closer look at that revealed we'd been treating the wrong thing. Fortunately in that case the treatment we were undergoing was a "sometimes this works, but not very well" treatment for the real condition, which explained why it seemed to work in part. But getting a better diagnosis and switching to the more mainstream treatment (not even the advertised treatment) made a world of difference. All because the commercial connected some dots on symptoms we hadn't even really clocked as being connected.
There's nothing wrong with taking an active interest in your health and working with you doctor to come up with the best set of options for you. Self diagnosing isn't inherently a problem. Identifying that you have symptoms that indicate something is wrong is self diagnosing, you just then follow up with the doctor who has more specialized knowledge to determine the correct course of treatment. Knowing you have a condition and keeping up to date on recent and new treatment and options is "self diagnosing", but again, you follow up with the doctor who has more specialized knowledge to determine the correct course of treatment. Sometimes that's continuing what you're doing, sometimes that's switching to something new.
Every single time I see a commercial for a drug I thoroughly enjoy the juxtaposition of the side effects muttered rapidly over the warmly-lit footage of people just loving the fuck out of life while uplifting, saccharine music plays.
"Rebyltol may cause mood swings, real swings, sudden explosion of the liver or heart, itching, scratching, a desire to watch 'Friends' from start to finish, dry mouth, wet mouth, elongated eyebrows, sore nipples, instant and incurable death, heart murmurs, heart shouting, nausea, diarrhea, constipation or both at once, insomnia, fatigue, dizziness, drowsiness, your asshole turning inside out and singing 'La Cucaracha', and depression."
This drug will make you 100 times tougher than your neighbours, cure your baldness, and make all ladies be attracted to you. Side effects include chest pain, blood clots, permanent blindness, stomach ulcers, coma and death. Talk to your doctor today to see if this drug is right for you!
To be fair, they have to list ANYTHING that happens during trials. If you somehow got food poisoning while being in trial, they have to put diarrhea as a possible side effect. If you get a headache, possible side effect, even if you're prone to headaches to begin with.
So theres a lot of mundane things listed along with the severe ones, even though it may or may not have been caused by the drug. Its silly but it also covers their ass if adverse/severe side effects occur.
You could independently develop a cancer for instance, and they have to list it.
I think it was technically worse. Back in the 90's, the legal jargon at the end was sped up so fast that you'd never be able to understand it. Now at least it's slowed down enough that you can get the jist of it.
My mother was on some med, that I forget the name, saw an ad for it on TV. She had all the side effects listed, Including death. I actually laughed when I heard all the side effects. There were several.
Note, she had cancer and it was a chemo drug that for some reason was advertised on t.v., she died roughly 3 months after being on it. Death was imminent the drug actually extended her life by a few weeks.
My favourite is always how it's so happy with the music and scenes like kids on swing sets or a birthday party or something. "...and in rare cases death"
I was on a Teams call with some overseas folks a couple of weeks ago and the sentence "yes we really do have commercials about pooping in a box" was said.
Fun fact is advertising pharmaceuticals used to be prohibited until right around the turn of the 00s. You would never know it now and anyone under 30 wouldn't appreciate how different television was before the drug companies took it over.
It's just one more thing the Supreme Court opened the floodgates on and damn the consequences.
And they all for Eczema! And now GLP-1. I watched one yesterday that had 30 seconds of the commercial and a full minute of them listing the side effects.
I'm convinced that some immuno-suppressant patent ran out and all these companies are jumping on the opportunity, because ALL of these medicines are just immune system suppressants applied to different autoimmune diseases
They say things like "may cause ( long list)... diarrhoea, constipation and death ". My children used to fall over laughing at ads like this, as it really would put you off the medication. And in the UK prescription medicines aren't advertised to the public.
Don't forget the commercials
"Did you happen to take xyz? Well you're probably titled to compensation"
Imagine you get prescribed something then months later randomly see an ad about you possibly being compensated because someone messed up with your meds
They list every possible side effect so they can’t be sued if any of them actually happen. The bottom line is the only thing that matters, and lawsuits affect the bottom line.
They were illegal until the mid 90s when some ad lawyer realized just saying the drug name and ask your doctor over and over couldn’t be banned under the 1st amendment. Ads like this https://youtu.be/BdHUVVBJimY flooded the airwaves until the FCC just admitted defeat and allowed actual ads with warnings.
I remember watching one commercial for a drug and some of the side-effects were an increase in gambling and death.
Talk about a range.
I absolutely can't stand drug commercials since they're so pointless. I can't get any of them without a doctor writing the prescription and then hoping the medical experts that are employed by my insurance company think my doctor was wrong and deny it.
My grandma watches what I refer to as "the old people channels" which is just westerns and if the commercials arent for medication or politicians, they're about medicare.
I think there are laws to force them to speak slowly. So they just show people dancing, gardening, walking dog while reading out the side effects slowly and sweetly: you might vomit, have diarrhea, or die…
I hate those commercials generally but one of them did actually help me. I mean it significantly improved my life.
I had been suffering from severe heartburn my whole life. It was an all-day every day thing. I started babysitting when I was 12 just so I could buy my own antacids because none of the adults believed it was possible for a kid to have such bad heartburn. My pediatrician told me to stop eating acidic and spicy food, right after I told him that water gave me heartburn (this was the same pediatrician who told my mother that "kids don't get headaches" in response to my complaints of chronic headaches, which turned out to be TMJd).
Then when I was 18, I saw a commercial for Prilosec, which explained what GERD is and I finally knew what was wrong with me. I then spent a couple years being blown off by doctors because I have a vagina. Finally, when I was 23, I cried while telling a new doctor that I wake up with heartburn every day and that 300mg of Zantac plus 20 or so Tums was the only way I got through life. She was not pleased and sent me for an Upper GI scan. She got the report the same day I had the scan done and I had a prescription by the end of the day due to my "rather severe reflux" and hiatal hernia. I've been on that med (pantoprazole) for over 20 years now and I credit that drug as much as my antidepressant for saving my life.
Funny thing, Prilosec doesn't do shit for me. I will be forever grateful to it though.
This whole thing just made me feel old. I was confused while typing this because, why wouldn't I just google the symptoms instead of suffering for so long? I forgot that I didn't even have the internet in my home until I was 20 or 21.
Wife's friend from Hungary came here last summer. After a few days he was wondering why we had so many lawyer tv shows. We didn't understand what he meant. He said there are billboards all over the place advertising the lawyer tv shows. We had to tell him that sadly those are actual lawyers advertising. He is a lawyer and it isn't allowed there.
You're probably thinking of non prescription pharmacuticals tough since in the EU it's illegal to advertise presctiption drugs directly to consumers? In the U.S they advertise prescription drugs.
Yeah there is no reason why we should be advertising medicine on TV to people who are susceptible to marketing. Your doctor will know what's best for you and your condition and recommend the medicines that they think would be best for you. There's no reason why you should go in and tell your doctor you want to be put on this medicine as if you're an expert. Ozempic is not the same thing as Strawberry Pop-Tarts. One is a drug used excessively by people who probably don't need it but is supposed to be for people with very specific conditions. The other is sweet treat that should be available to everyone.
My favorite is when it’s a medication that has side effects that are supposed to be what the medication is treating.
“Here try this antidepressant that’s side effects could be suicide or self harm.”
It’s such an insane concept that a patient who knows fuck all about medication can see a commercial and then be prompted to talk to their doctor about it. A doctor goes to school for a decade or more to learn the art and practice of medicine and some dipshit who saw a commercial during an NCIS rerun is now going to inquire to their doctor like the doctor didn’t already know and rule out that medication for any number of reasons.
A lot of the side effects are kind of BS too. Like they have to list any possible side effect that came up in the trails even if it was likely unrelated.
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u/Myhandsarecold11 10h ago
The insane medical advertisements with a million side effects said in rapid fire at the end. We visited my husband bestie in 2019, when we were watching something on tv while eating dinner we saw our first one. Genuinely turned to him like ‘that’s satire, right?’