[img]958|left|Alex Campbell||no_popup[/img]Dateline Boston — What do you find creepy? Spiders? Mouldy bread? That guy who hangs out at the laundromat on Friday nights? Here’s what I think is creepy: meat preparation. Elective plastic surgery. Hairs on a bar of soap.
I see one of the things I find most creepy at least four times a day. It’s those drug ads that show the inside of someone’s body. I can’t decide which is creepier — the bone and joint ones or the beating heart ones. I really don’t like seeing images of the inside of the body, whether it’s a skeleton, the blood vessels caked with clots or blocked airways. The worst is a beating heart. I don’t know why that freaks me out so much, but I’ve never liked seeing or hearing a heart beating. Just let me live, don’t show me how I’m doing it. No wonder I never went to that traveling museum exhibit that showed dead people in muscle form. Gives me the shivers.
The part I find most disturbing about those drug commercials is when a regular person has a body part that is suddenly animated. A woman gets up from a park bench, and oh! Her hip and knee bones are shown, in black and white! A man is having trouble breathing — let’s take a close-up look at his lungs and find out why. While Mr. Jones was living his life, eerie little pink blood clots were living theirs, nestled comfortably in the fatty pink lining of his arteries. Eeew! Please, just describe gently what’s going on, tell me the name of the drug, and ask me to talk to my doctor. That’s all the info I need.
What I don’t need is the list of side effects that make me want to run away from any of these drugs. Do I really want to ingest something that may cause dizziness, constipation, ringing in the ears, itchiness, walking in my sleep or death? No, thanks.
I’d rather take a shower with a hairy bar of soap while deboning a chicken than watch those ads. Let’s keep our insides inside and have ongoing communication with our doctors. Sometimes the best medicine is no medicine at all.
Ms. Campbell may be contacted at snobbyblog@gmail.com
