The Middleman Mentality in America

I just saw a commercial on TV that showed a close-up of a big leg, broken and mending in a lumpy grey cast that looked like it had been globbed on by a kindergartner.

I could comment on the shoddy workmanship of orthopedic practioners, but let’s move forward to the purpose of this article – the reason for that commercial.

It was an alert to people with osteoporosis that they could sue their doctors if they had broken various bones since starting drugs prescribed by their doctors to prevent osteoporosis.

I promise not to use any more big words after this next couple of osteoporosises, because they are too hard to type. If you don’t know what osteoporosis is, come out of your wilderness cave and turn on the TV. There you will learn, among other things, that it is impossible to get or maintain an erection in America. You will also find out that several drugs - developed by good, honest drug companies - have been prescribed to help prevent osteoporosis – drugs whose very purpose was to make things all better in the “O-word” area of people’s lives – and now we come to find out that these selfsame drugs had in fact been causing the very symptom – THE VERY SYMPTOM – that they have been relentlously tauting as a cure on TV, in magazines, and everywhere else visible to the human eye – yes, these drugs that were meant to prevent broken bones caused by the O-word actually CAUSE broken bones.

You might be wondering, what kind of a person can produce the run-on sentence in the last paragraph and get away with it. But we’re not here to talk about grammer for crying out loud (or spelling either, for that matter), we’re here to talk about something I’m sure I’ll remember if I reread what I just wrote.

Yes, we’re here to talk about the middleman mentality in America. What do commercials about drug companies being sued have to do with that? Something, you can bet your bottom dollar on that.

It’s just this. The big-O can be helped by weight-bearing exercise and a healthy diet rich in calcium and Vitamin D. Healthy diet refers to foods in the non-potato chip/non-pork-rind family. Weight-bearing means getting off the couch and bearing your weight around the block a few times, as well as using your arms to lift some weight – like your chocolate-smeared, bawling toddler with the diaper sagging to his ankles, and so forth. Many, many Americans refuse to exercise, preferring to sit in the comfort of their home and watch people on TV very much like themselves who waddle around and scream obscenities at their friends and loved ones all day long.

This is where the drug companies come in – the middlemen in the health care industry. They create drugs for all the billions of Americans in the aforementioned paragraph so they won’t HAVE to exercise or give up the foods they love, such as beer and cigarettes. Instead they can take a pill.

In the case of the O-word, the pill is supposed to help prevent broken bones. So if you’ve got a bone that broke because you took a drug to keep that was supposed to keep it from breaking – a perfectly good bone that might not have broken, left to its own devices, for years and years – then you have the right to sue the #*)@! out of the drug company, according to these commercials.

To be continued….if I don’t forget