jhib
Footballguy
Maybe I wasn't clear with my analogy. I can have a lawyer represent me or I can represent myself using my limited knowledge. I can have a doctor treat my medical condition or I can just try to eat right and self-medicate.Nobody is arguing things are perfect or that there aren't major flaws, but this strikes me as something like, "I've never needed to use a lawyer to represent me in a trial because I do things right and have been lucky. There are a lot of shady lawyers out there and so much of the law business is governed by money, so if I ever find myself in that position, I'm just going to represent myself."While I agree that pharmaceutical ads have become beyond ridiculous, you're going a little far with your other hot take by throwing all prescription drugs in one bucket and implying that they aren't needed if you just eat right and self-medicate. Some health issues aren't going to be helped that way, but I'm happy that you are lucky enough not to have any of those issues.
It's ok to be annoyed by and skeptical of ads on tv but still trust your doctor. Though personally, any doctor I've ever had would laugh at me if I tried to "make" them give me a prescription for something I saw on tv. If any doctor gave me a prescription just because I told them to, I'd get myself a new doctor.
I spent the first decade or so of my legal career doing pharmaceutical drug product liability defense. Here are some of the things that I found out occur in the medical/pharma drug prescription industry.
1. Drug reps log descriptions of their drug calls on doctors. They log the number of samples they leave. They log the number of samples the doctor used for patients.
2. Drug companies track the number of prescriptions a doctor prescribes drugs. They know how many prescriptions Doctor A has prescribed of Drug W, and competitor Drugs X, Y, Z each month.
3. Drug companies use/used doctors as speakers for their drugs. They had national, regional and local speakers to promote their drugs. The speakers weren't chosen because they had a certain expertise in a field. They were chosen based on the amount of the drug companies drugs they prescribed in a certain month. When Doctor A didn't prescribe Drug W, Doctor A was told he would be removed as regional speaker for the drug company if he didn't up his prescriptions. Doctors were paid tens of thousands of dollars, would have their families sent to places like Hawaii, the Bahamas and other tropical locations to spend an hour talking about the drug at CMEs or symposiums.
4. For some health issues there are certain protocols for treatment. Like if you have Ailment A, then Drug X would be a first-in-line treatment option. If that isn't tolerated or work then you move to Drug Y. Some Doctors would go straight to the third-line option because they were regional speakers. So they would push possibly lesser effective and less tolerated treatments to get their prescriptions up so they could keep their speaker status.
I am with @Ministry of Pain here. I never take prescription drugs for anything. I don't think I ever will. I've read drug studies, internal emails from drug company CEOs, legal, doctors, scientists and FDA officials. The amount of crap that they did and do to get a drug approved and to market and then the stuff they do once it's on the market. Taking prescription drugs is a hard pass for me.
Terrible analogy. You can represent yourself, there are many people the are pro se. You can't prescribe yourself medication, you need a proxy.
I think Dana White said it best for me, "I'll never talk to a doctor about my general health ever again. If I break my arm, I'm gonna go see a doctor if I need surgery. I'm gonna go see a doctor, about my general health... never again."
For some legal/health issues that might work out. For others, it's a stupid decision.