Friday, August 21, 2009

"Take Fewer Pills"

I've been seeing a commercial for Aleve fairly often lately -- and the gist of the thing seems to be "take Aleve! You have to take fewer pills!"

If you have arthritis pain, the voiceover intones somewhat ominously, if you take Tylenol, you could be taking "four times as many pills", a and shows a pained-looking woman looking at a box for another pain reliever..."two pills every six hours...that's 8 pills a day!" In another ad, we're assured that 2 liquigel Aleve work as well as four Advil.

While no one likes to take pills, I have to wonder about the line of reasoning that makes the simplistic argument that 2pills is better than 8 pills. Because those two pills purport to do the same thing as the eight or twelve pills the "other" medicine requires. You're simply taking more medication at one time.

Well, what if my headache or pain is gone in four hours, or six hours? Why would I take twelve hours worth of pain medication for it? Why overmedicate if you don't have to? Basically, the ads for Aleve are encouraging us to take more meds than we need, because it's "convenient" or easier. I'm sure I'm reading far more into this than I should be, but it airs so often during the day that I have become Officially Annoyed.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Maybe you should just turn the TV off? Listen to some music instead? Just a thought...

Unknown said...

The TV ad that I saw said that you can take four times fewer pills if you use Aleve. "Four times fewer"? That makes no sense! If you take two pills instead of eight, that's one-fourth the number of pills, but not four times fewer!