Overall: Recalling the old prejudice against 'patent medicine'
Overall: Recalling the old prejudice against 'patent medicine'
By: Bill Mead
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Posted by editor Mon Nov 6, 2006 11:50:20 PST
Viewed 616 times
0 responses 0 comments I think commercial television would go bankrupt if it didn't have all those commercials for medications. If you watch enough TV you become convinced there's a remedy for every mental and physical ill. Even when you don't think there is anything wrong with you, some advertiser pops up to convince you otherwise.
For example, I'm a nervous guy who does a lot of twitching when I have to sit too long. Now, after nearly 80 years on this planet, I'm told I have a serious problem known as Restless Leg Syndrome and I need to ask my doctor for a prescription. No thanks. Just let me twitch away.
I'm old enough to remember when the only medicinal advertising was for non-prescription remedies. Advertising of prescription drugs was unheard of until recently, probably because logic told the drug companies that since patients couldn't buy them without a doctor's prescription, why not spend the promotion budget on the doctors? I guess they have found out that today's patients don't hesitate to ask their doctors for the advertised stuff.
My sainted mother didn't trust medicine very much, which I think was characteristic of people who grew up around the turn of the 20th century. She was especially opposed to taking “patent medicines” which was the old-time way of referring to over-the-counter products. She wouldn't even allow aspirin in our house. Instead, she fought headaches with anonymous little pills dispensed by the family doctor. I'm certain they were aspirin.
I have an idea that people of my mother's vintage were skeptical of non-prescription medications because they should have been. Most of it was worthless and most of the rest was dangerous. The FDA wasn't around a century ago so entrepreneurs could sell just about anything.
It's hard to believe that so many so-called patent medicines of the 19th century contained large amounts of alcohol, opium, cocaine and I don't know what all, none of it calculated to prolong anybody's life although these nostrums certainly did relieve pain in most cases. One of them was called Lydia Pinkham's and was aimed at relieving women's menstrual distress. It sure did inasmuch as the basic ingredient was plain old hooch. Respectable Baptist women bought it by the case.
Another suspect remedy of that era was called laudanum which was opium dissolved in alcohol. There were no restrictions on this potion. It was especially popular with Civil War veterans who suffered lifetime pain from the primitive surgery they received on the battlefield.
We shake our heads at these once-legal substances but who knows how many heavily-promoted prescription drugs of today might prove to be just as damaging in the long run? But don't let me scare you away from getting whatever you need to make you feel better.
You'll have to excuse me now. My leg is starting to twitch again and I think we're out of Lydia Pinkham's.
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