There’s a term I’ve heard in my life, “darkest day in history.” Well, given all of the horrible things that our species has done on and to this planet I think it would be challenging to identify a single day. One could identify such a list by category and even then it would be hard to pick one day as well within each category. With that said, in the category of “advertising” in all forms of media, particularly television, I nominate the day that the U.S. Congress voted to allow direct to consumer advertising by pharmaceutical companies. I can only imagine how much the pharma industry lobbyists paid to make that happen back in the 1990s. While I’m not a big TV watcher, I do turn it on late in the evening and each night the sheer number of pharma ads is staggering.<\/p>\n
What is very sad in my view is that the constant repetition of information about illnesses or the potential for contracting them serves to “program” people to expect that illness is inevitable. But that’s simply not true, as that is just a “belief” that is shared by people, not some absolute truth. The mind is a very powerful thing, and whatever it accepts as “true” IS true. For this reason it is critical for people to discipline their minds to ignore negative information, especially when disguised behind some warm fuzzy ad. In my case whenever I see these pharma ads appear I immediately mute the TV and pay no mind to the man behind the curtain pushing the buttons of fear. Just because the marketplace is always trying to sell something doesn’t oblige us to listen to the pitch, and this is particularly true for ads that actually are designed to dis-empower us.<\/p>\n
Bye for now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There’s a term I’ve heard in my life, “darkest day in history.” Well, given all of the horrible things that our species has done on and to this planet I think it would be challenging to identify a single day. … Continue reading