Restless BS Syndrome
I am sick to death of all these new medical conditions that the pharmaceutical companies are making up so they can sell us new drugs. They take some normal human condition and decide it’s an illness, create a drug to “cure” it and whammo, a whole new industry is born.My latest medical pet peeve? Restless Leg Syndrome. What the hell? Okay, maybe there are some people who aren’t sleeping at night somewhere and are busy flapping away in their beds. Well, guess what? I’ve been tapping and flapping and twitching my leg for years. When I sit, I twitch. When I go to bed I flap my leg for a while, I’ve been doing it for 47 years. And you know what happens when I flap my leg? It moves! Oh, the horror of it! And the sheets and covers move, too! Oh, the agony!
For pity’s sake, I’m just a twitchy person. Now they’re telling me I’m diseased. What crap. I got a cure for Restless Leg Syndrome, it’s called Ignoring It. So I twitch. So what? Now it’s a syndrome? Now I’m handicapped? What a load of crap.
Here’s the real story: a drug company manufactures some new blood pressure medication. They notice in the drug trials that the drug has a side effect that makes people stare at the wall. Dr. Scam Artist says to his lab flunky, “Hey, I got an idea. You know how the human eye works? It has to move a lot, right? To do its job. Let’s make it a disease. Restless Eye Syndrome. We give people this pill, they stare at a wall, they’re cured! We’ll make millions! Deploy the marketing team!” I can hear the radio ads now. Do you scan the shelves at a grocery store and have difficulty finding the product you’re searching for? You may have Restless Eye Syndrome. Try Eye-Z, the latest drug from Ripoff Labs. Ka-ching!
It’s clear that the drug companies are just capitalizing on this idiotic new trend of people labeling themselves by their conditions or diseases. I overheard some woman in the store the other day on her cellphone going on about being bi-polar, she’s a child of an alcoholic, she’s a food addict. Most of these syndromes were made up by doctors because stupid people came into their offices who didn’t want to take responsibility for their self-destructive behaviors, so they went in and got a label, got a jar of pills and suddenly they had an excuse to be self-centered, fat and abusive. I get to yell at you—I have anger issues. I get to eat a cake and feel sorry for myself— I’m a food addict. I got another name for these people: WHINERS.
Not that I don’t have sympathy for those suffering from true mental disorders and trauma. I’ve had many friends who used their diagnoses to stop their self-destructive behaviors. But mostly I know people who love to wallow in their made-up conditions and use them as an excuse to further destroy themselves and those around them. It’s these morons I have ZERO sympathy for.
I love the food addict BS. For cryin’ out loud, if you don’t eat, you die. Hello? We are all food “addicts”, for God’s sake, if we weren’t we’d be supermodels.
Problem is, if you don’t play the new game of identifying yourself by your conditions or syndromes, someone will come along and do the job for you. I like to walk. Oh, you’re a Walk Addict. I watched too much TV last night. You’re a TV Addict! Basically, anything we like too much is an addiction, anything we don’t like to do is a syndrome or a disorder. Yeah, I got a “syndrome”, it’s called “Sick of all the BS” syndrome.
I took some stupid medical questionnaire recently and they asked: do you drink daily? Well, of course, I do. I could hear the Beer Police revving up their engines and starting toward my house. Do you sometimes “binge” drink? (Three or more drinks at a sitting.) Of course. Why not? Oh, you are an alcoholic! You must be medicated! Who comes up with this crap? I’ll tell you who, someone who is trying to sell a pill or a week at some expensive rehab facility.
Okay, for sure there are people who drink too much, eat too much, smoke too much and hurt themselves and those closest to them. These are the idiots who are ruining it for the rest of us. Just because there are jerks out there who get tanked, get in their car and drive through their living room window, suddenly, I’m an alcoholic because I drank three beers? What crap!
I have had a parade of people in my life who keep trying to label me because I like to drink. My biggest offense seems to be that I enjoy it. Because I take responsibility for the fact that I like drinking and I admit it, that makes me a dangerous and out-of-control whacko in DENIAL. I must be stopped! Someone come medicate me! Because beer is EVIL. No, instead of drinking a couple beers to relax in the evenings, I’m supposed to take some stupid pharmaceutical drug that will make my ear hair grow and will make my vision blurry and will make rational thinking nearly impossible, but it will be the RIGHT way to medicate myself because we all know that anyone who drinks three beers is an alcoholic! Why? Because the drug companies say so! Just say yes to corporate drugs!
I got a new condition for ya. It’s called Stupidity. And this whole bloody planet suffers from it and guess what? There is no cure!
So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go have a beer and watch my leg twitch. But I won’t be taking any pills for it. But I am going to label myself. Just call me Twitchy.
©2007, Janet Periat
Tags: beer, drugs, modern medicine, pharmaceutical scams, psychological syndromes
February 13th, 2008 at 2:58 am
Wow, I am totally in agreement on this one… although the doofuses who use medical terminology to avoid facing their own problems piss me off much less than the doctors who seem to exploit such people.
I wrote about this on my own blog, you may recall. I think the last 5 times I’ve gone to see a doctor, the doctor has told me, “We can’t do anything at all whatsoever about the problem or complaint that brought you in here. But now that you’re here, I’m very worried about this other new, symptomless, undetectable disease that you didn’t know you had, which will require you to pop expensive pills every day for the rest of your life, even though you have no real hope of the pill curing this invisible syndrome, but we still want you to buy, …**ahem**… er, that is, take the expensive pills.”
It just totally sets off my “Snake Oil” detectors. Last year, for example, I asked my doctor about a soreness near my ribs, which I figured was perhaps related to posture. She fumbled around for a couple of visits without finding an explanation. She ordered an ultrasound. The ultrasound found nothing about my rib pain, but revealed a “Fatty Liver”. (The liver is not near the location of the pain.) Look it up. Yet another symptomless disease with no cause (probably genetic), with no cure, which doesn’t progress into anything, doesn’t shorten your lifespan… in fact, all this syndrome does, is to make your doctor worry about you and pester you to change your lifestyle.
Hey, my @$$ is fat, too, is there some special Syndrome for that??
I wrote this on my own site, talking about Gilbert Syndrome, yet another symptomless, meaningless disease:
It seems clear to me what’s going on here. Doesn’t it? This is pure speculation, but I suspect some chain of events like this:
> The American Medical Association held a big meeting a few years back, and somebody in the hematology committee announced, “Hey, we have a great new blood test which will detect Bilirubin to one part per ten billion. So now we need to pick some numbers out of a hat which will represent the average level of Bilirubin in healthy blood, and a reasonable range of values.” Other hematologists stepped forward with some numbers.
> Then some nonconformist doctor piped up and said, “Hey wait a minute, there are people whose numbers just naturally fall outside that range, but they’re still healthy. What do we do about them?”
> The AMA committee chair answered, “I know — let’s name a syndrome after them!”
…The American medical system presumably doesn’t pay much attention to this syndrome because it is not possible to make money off of a disease with no symptoms.
For example, I’m trying to imagine the TV commercial for the fictitious drug which might cure this particular syndrome:
[BEAUTIFUL SUPERMODEL IN NEGLIGEE CAVORTS IN A GREEN FIELD] “Do you have high levels of Bilirubin in your blood? Go to your doctor right away and ask to be tested for eligibility for Ryeandrubinol, the new drug which helps people like you control their Bilirubin.”
[MORE CAVORTING] “Because some people live long and perfectly healthy, happy, normal lives without ever even realizing that they have a condition known as hyperbilirubensis, or Gilbert’s Syndrome.”
[CAVORTING STOPS AND SUPERMODEL LOOKS DOLEFULLY INTO THE CAMERA] “But you wouldn’t want to be the sort of person who goes through life without knowing something like that, would you? So ask your doctor about Ryeandrubinol today.”
* During clinical trials, Ryeandrubinol was associated with certain side effects such as continuous projectile vomiting, rectal bleeding, Sudden Inexplicable Adult Death Syndrome (a variant of SIDS), Tourette’s Syndrome, and susceptibility to flesh-eating bacteria. Women who are pregnant or might ever conceivably wish to become pregnant during their lifetimes, must not take Ryeandrubinol, nor handle the pills, nor approach within fifty feet of a person who has ever taken this pill. Patients undergoing treatment with Ryeandrubinol have been known to set off airport metal detectors and nuclear radiological alarms, even when the pills are not on their person. So be certain to carry your doctor’s prescription information with you at all times while travelling. If symptoms such as eyeball disembodiment occur while using Ryeandrubinol, discontinue use instantly, induce vomiting, proceed to the nearest exit in a calm and orderly manner, and consult your physician.
[SUPERMODEL] “So ask your doctor if Ryeandrubinol is right for YOU.”
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I will attempt to post a comic here, but I dunno if I can get away with the HTML:
link
February 14th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
Too FREAKIN’ FUNNY, dude. And then, not. Our health system has failed. Miserably. Thanks for the comment, honey.