This post agrees with my overall purpose of the blog. The theme of the essay is the way the media influence the public’s perception of medications. Our society is so heavily influenced by the media to the extent that whatever the media says must be the truth.
The media can be at times a manipulative medium. The company of the prescription drugs are obviously trying to put the medications in the best light possible so they are going to minimized the exposure of the side effects and emphasize the good points. As a result, the general public receives a false perception that the medications aren’t harmful and overconsumption of these medications will not kill them.
These “false” advertisements affect the public, especially the teenager population in a negative aspect. Teenagers don’t understand the harm in taking these drugs so they abuse the medications in order to achieve a state of happiness. They see the actors on television in a state of happiness and relief when they take the medications so the consumers want to achieve the same effect. But people should think twice but it’s too late to prevent the deadly consequences from happening.
On the top of the webpage, I added some youtube videos that show just how much commercials, not necessarily deceive people, but definitely keeping the consumers from the whole truth. The commercials emphasize the goodness of the product with the actors and display how happy and comfortable the actors are after taking the medication. Many consumers would be appealed to buy those products in order to achieve the same state as those actors and think that "wow, there are barely any horrible side effects of this drug". Manipulating the public for self-interest is the wrong thing to do especially since lives are on the line and serious consequences may happen because of the misuse of these medications.
Pharmaceuticals drugs have come a long way in society; from a time when medications were scarce and used by a few to now, where the availability of medications is prevalent in any area and to anyone, for the most part. Phenomenal advancement of medical technology enabled numerous medicinal breakthroughs on new medications and the drugs to be more easily distributed to the people. The proliferation of drugs that are capable of treating various illnesses compared to the past when there were only a few known drugs, contributed to the lack of knowledge of these drugs by the general public. In addition, the increase of pharmaceutical companies producing new medications and the saturation of pharmacies resulted in the increase of competitiveness between companies and the media, proved to be the most efficient medium in advertising the respective products to consumers. The exposure of medicine is not necessarily only through commercials, but also in television dramas, newspapers, radios, etc.; because of the significant influence medicine has in our daily lives. Sure enough the media is an important tool in the medicinal field to inform the general public about drugs, but the media tends to circulate misleading messages about the health field and market drugs without putting a strong emphasis on the harmful side effects of the medications.
Not everybody has the chance to go to doctors and physicians to ask about the different types of drugs or what function each drug performs so as a result, people have to rely on the media to keep up with the new medicinal advances. Since the people rely only on the media for this information, the media can affect the way people care for their health and their outlook on health issues. The attitudes and beliefs that people have on the medical field are capable of being shaped by the media, which shows the strong effect it has on people. The information provided on the media sources may contain errors in them, but people won’t know the difference and accept that information. Therefore, there shouldn’t be that strong of a reliance on the media because the way the media depict health field practitioners or the medical field itself and information on certain illnesses conveyed to the public can be often misleading and fictitious. In television shows such as the Extreme Makeover and I Want a Famous Face, plastic surgery is depicted as a practice that is used for changing one’s appearance and beautifying oneself but in reality; it is much more than that (Parikh 163-165). Plastic surgery encompasses other surgeries besides cosmetic surgery, for example, reconstructive surgery, which is used to repair functional impairments caused by burns or serious injuries, congenital abnormalities, and used to treat against cancer or tumors. There is also microsurgery in which plastic surgeons transfer tissue to a defected part of the body where no local tissue is present. Plastic surgery has much more meaning and substance than just what the media portrays it to be. The society’s image of how a typical hospital should be is communicated through television dramas such as Grey’s Anatomy and ER, but people fail to understand that a drama is a drama that is purely fictitious, filled with fictional characters and made up plot and storylines. People who watch these medical dramas are sometimes left with disappointment because they realize that what they experience in reality is not as satisfying as the experience portrayed on T.V. A common occurrence in these medical dramas is that there will always be a dramatic scene where there will be a miracle in saving someone’s life or a misfortune where someone dies. During the scenes where the doctor saves a patient’s life, the audience takes that into account and as a result, they have high expectations for doctors. They believe that doctors can perform miracles like in the dramas and if the doctor fails to do so, there is a build-up of distrust among the patients towards the doctor (Parikh 163-165). The media gives a false image that doctors are capable of healing any kind of sicknesses because the television dramas portray them to be an all mighty being that can perform countless miracles.
Media coverage of illnesses especially on newspaper is widely popular among the general public because people don’t have to pay a daily visits to physicians and still be updated on the new medications coming out. According to several surveys, newspapers are a highly trusted source of information, even more so then televisions and online media. People even trust the information on the newspaper or magazines more than other media mediums, friends, family, nurses, or physicians, so it is evident that the newspaper has an overwhelming effect on the people reading it (Fishman, and Casarett 4). Since the public is so heavily dependent on these newspapers, the information should be completely free from mistakes because if not, the erroneous information would persist and be transferred from one person to another. People act upon what they know, so if the newspaper gives them the wrong knowledge, the consequences might be severe. Caspermeyer et al performed a test that demonstrated the importance of news coverage of health issues in the mass media. The illness that he focused on was neurologic illness and they investigated nine major newspapers to see how often medical errors were made about neurologic illness. According to the study, exaggeration was prevalent 20% of the time and “stigmatizing” language was used 21% of the time in the newspaper articles (Fishman, and Casarett). This study is only based on the newspaper articles on one illness but if one newspaper have the history of exaggerating information on one type of illness, why won’t they be able to exaggerate on the other types of illnesses?
The increased production of medicine due to the advanced medicinal technology contributed to the idea of Direct-to-Consumer marketing. Direct-to-Consumer marketing directly appeals to the audience through commercial advertisement. The availability of drugs compared to the past where drugs were dispensed only by doctors, contribute to the popularity of these advertisements because there are so many types of medications that companies are trying to sell. In a sense, the doctors should be the only ones that can dispense drugs because they are the ones that have expertise in this field and know what kind of medication is best for you. Frequently, patients would ask their doctors to prescribe them the drugs on television, but the medications that they want may not be the best for the patients and are more expensive and futile to use. Since the companies are trying to sell their products, they emphasize strongly on the benefits and high-quality aspects of their product and tend to mention the health risks associated with the medications at a minimum. Because highlighting the beneficial points of the products and portraying them in the best light help the companies earn more money, the side effects are not discussed in great detail. The general public will not have sufficient knowledge of the drug and use it recklessly because they don’t understand the severity of the consequences (“Commercial Alert”).
Furthermore, the advertisement of these drugs is seen by a variety of audiences, children and the elderly alike. When teenagers see that these drugs are available to them in any local pharmacy, they believe that there are no serious side effects of mass consumption of these medications. The advertisements don’t display the negative side effects so people, especially teenagers are inclined to try it out since they believe that they won’t get hurt. Nowadays the accessibility to over-the-counter drugs also contributes to the abuse of drugs in our society particularly among the youth. Since OTC drugs don’t need to be prescribed by doctors, anyone can get them and because they don’t need to be given out by doctors, there is an assumption that OTC drugs can’t be harmful to the body. Advertisements that portray a certain drug should provide educational knowledge on the beneficial and negative side effects of the drug to the public before the consumption of it in order to ensure safe use of the drug.
Direct to consumer drugs may also mislead the consumers into thinking that taking in medications is the primary way in treating an illness when there can be other ways that have less chance of side effects. For example, dieting and exercising the correct way, stress reduction and other preventative measures can be taken instead of medicine for the body to get better. The doctors may even lose patients and hurt their reputation as a bad doctor because sometimes doctors refuse to prescribe certain drugs to patients. Therefore, doctors may sometimes prescribe the medications that their patients want just to keep them happy and to encourage them to come back to their clinic again (“Prescription Drug Ads” ). This is morally wrong of the doctor because they should look into the interest of the patients first not self-interest. Direct to consumer drugs may lead to corruption in the medical field if not, the field is already corrupted.
The media and medicine can go hand and hand and contribute to the better of society by distributing reliable updated information about medications to the general public. But this is not the case. The media tends to exaggerate and mislead the public on issues associated with the medical field. People perceive the things portrayed by the media as an exact replica of reality and when reality doesn’t meet their expectations, the distrust of the doctors and physicians increase. As a result, the public will lose faith in the medical field as a whole. The advertisement of drugs in society is greatly sugarcoated to enhance the benefits of the drugs so that consumers will be inclined to buy them, but then the side effects of the drugs are barely mentioned so the public’s knowledge about the drugs are at a minimal. The misleading conduct of the media can in the long run, harm the medical field because the discrepancies that arise can prevent people from consuming the medications.
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