#713 Ambling

In a recent essay, I was talking about how drug companies market directly to consumers these days. That got me thinking about how it used to be.
Your doctor would most likely say “…take two aspirin and call me in the morning,” knowing from his years of wisdom that most complaints were best cured by a little time and the body’s own tendency to heal itself. Occasionally, he would decide—for himself—whether you needed a drug. Then he’d write you a prescription.
The drugs all had mysterious chemical names—not fancy direct to consumer marketing names—and you could never figure them out as you looked at the Doc’s scrawled prescription when you took it to the pharmacist.
The pharmacist would hem and haw and often grumpily count out careful measures of whatever it was he thought the doctor had written. Sometimes he got clues to deciphering the Doctor’s poor penmanship by putting you through a little verbal diagnostic examination of his own. Redundancy at its best.
When you paid your bill, the doctor and the pharmacist usually had convenient terms. The drugs themselves weren’t super-mega drugs with millions of dollars of advertising behind them, and so were affordable enough you didn’t have to take out a payday loan to cover them.
By the way, when I wrote about those payday loans the other day, the term usury came up. I found out something interesting. Usury isn’t just a cool word that starts with a “u” you actually pronounce.
It currently means the practice of loaning money at exorbitant interest rates. But it used to mean the practice of loaning money with any interest rates.
And it was once a sin to loan money with interest. So, in the middle ages, only non-Christians could do it. Which lead to the story of the Merchant of Venice and pounds of flesh and stuff.
Shakespeare’s depiction of interest equivalent to losing a pound of flesh sounded scary.
Big Pharma should do some marketing research. If enough people have read The Merchant of Venice, “Usury” might make a good name for a diet pill...
America, ya gotta love it.