RLS, ADD, ETC.

Warning: Rant Enclosed.

I first saw a commercial for a drug to treat Restless Leg Syndrome (RLS) several months ago, and immediately got pissed off.

This is quite possibly the grossest case of the medical/pharmaceutical industry making up a disease in order to market the drugs they invent (maybe second only to ADD which I’ve always felt to be a fancy name for “being a kid”).

“Is the urge to get up and actually walk around getting in the way of your six hours of nightly television viewing? Don’t wanna get off your fat American ass and actually do something?? Are you having trouble sitting in the line at the McDonald’s Drive Thru and actually considering parking your car and going into the store?? Is your body trying to tell you that spending 80% of your waking hours sitting down is bad for it?? Then HAVE SOME PATIENTED DRUGS!!!

I’m sorry, but I need to call shenanigans on this whole RLS thing – it’s just another case of the drug companies inventing problems and telling people, through television that they have them, and that the only cure is to buy their pills. All the sleep disorder pills, all the depression pills… I realize that some people have some serious problems that some of these pills can fix, I have suffered with insomnia – I have suffered with depression -- but when TV is diagnosing you as opposed to a trained physician, there is something wrong. And when the cure is automatically to ingest addictive chemicals with potentially very dangerous side-effects as opposed to maybe – god forbid – looking at your life and changing some things so that you can be more healthy – something is VERY wrong. Americans are so medicated right now. We have the highest occurrence of depression in the entire world!! Why is that? I propose the reason is three-fold. 1) Because we’re constantly being told by TV and radio commercials that we can always be happy if we take Zoloft and we should go ask our doctors for it (a quick aside… the word Zoloft is so ingrained in our society right now that my word processor knew to automatically capitalize it while it doesn’t automatically capitalize American) 2) because Doctors – rather prescribes (some drug commercials simply refer to doctors as “Prescribers” now – that’s not even a word) – are given incentives to prescribe these drugs. And 3) because American values are so incredibly off – we are taught from birth to value money and material things over all… The All Mighty Dollar has become the All Mighty God in our lives… we are trained to desire a life of things we can’t possibly afford – so we work our asses off at jobs we hate to get money to get these things, and then all of a sudden we find out that even with these things that we’ve worked so hard for, we’re not happy – so rather than look at our lives and realize that our priorities have been completely off, we take drugs to placate us and make us better workers – so that the rich white guys that we work for can make more money.

The pharmaceutical industry people, the lobbyists and the doctors who just dish out pills –are the real drug pushers. They are the real scourges on society. What’s even worse is that these are the same people who have created the Partnership for a Drug Free America – the sponsors of those lovely commercials that tell us that our purchase of a bag of weed goes directly towards funding future terrorist attacks – only because they cant patent and profit off something that grows in the Earth. The utter hypocrisy, the utter greed, the gross lack of concern for the well-being of citizens of the world puts these drug companies and their peons among the worst people in the world. Try this – live simply. Get outside and be active. Do some yoga. Use your hard-earned money to buy experiences that will create beautiful memories – not things that will just collect dust, and if you must medicate yourself, enjoy some chemicals that come from the Earth.

Be well,
z