The
Old Coot has the side effects.
By
Merlin Lessler
If
you watch regular TV, or even streaming TV, you can’t escape a barrage of ads
for prescription drugs. I used to think of drug dealers as guys in back alleys,
wearing top coats, selling heroin. Now, it’s 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’t required by the FDA to warn of the side effects.
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’s
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.
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 life style? 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.
I
started writing this article to complain that I have some of the side effects
of medicines I don’t 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’s 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, eighteen years before I sat
in the back of her classroom. If she had, or if I had paid attention, you
wouldn’t have to suffer when my article wanders all over the place. Or maybe,
it’s just an old coot thing. And no, I’m not comparing myself to Rod Serling,
just the opposite.
