Miljenko's Blog

One of the most important "life skills" which nobody teaches us but is enormously helpful is to be able to take our own "emotional temperature". Or to assess our own "emotional vital signs". How am I feeling exactly - am I anxious, afraid, tired, angry, content, disappointed, lonely, elated, frustrated. The parallel to our physical health is pretty direct - in order to know "what is wrong" with us physically, the first thing everybody does is check your vital signs. Temperature, blood pressure, pulse, respirations. Just by doing a quick scan of those we can zero in on or eliminate a whole bunch of areas to look at. Our emotional states are no different but we don't really approach them that way. We just go along when angry without doing anything about it or even realizing that it is the state that we are in. If you had high blood pressure would you go and do things to make it worse until the point where you collapse? Well if you don...

There is no reason for us to be inundated with happy looking people in ads telling us how wonderful Invokana or Cymbalta are (followed by fine print of horrible potential side effects). There is no reason why I should have to know what Invokana does and does not do - this is not about being an "informed consumer". If I need Invokana, there is a professional whose job it is to tell me that and to understand precisely how and why Invokana is for me - that would be my Doctor. Pharmaceutical advertising is nothing but an arms race - companies spend Billions for something that is completely unnecessary if only from one point in time everyone had to play under different rules. Tobacco company profits did not go down when cigarette advertising was banned - they went up because they saved on all that advertising expense. Pharma companies would not have less money to invest in R & D if they were not allowed to advertise - arguably they would have more. At the same time the entire ...