Not the stallion you’d like to be in bed? We’ve got a pill for that. Feeling a little blue lately? We can offer you SEVERAL pills for that. For better or for worse, global media in the form of direct to consumer advertising has put an increasing amount of the onus for health care squarely in the laps of consumers. Gone are the practices of only a few decades ago, when the physician’s word was gospel, and the patient was grateful for whatever diagnosis they got. These days, you can’t go far without being reminded that you’re probably doing quite as well as the happy people in the drug advertisements and that you should definitely, “Ask your doctor about [insert hot drug of the moment here].” Inside the doctor’s office, new media has created an interaction much closer to a dialogue than a diagnosis.

Depending on whom you ask, these new developments are either long-sought improvements to patient care, or in danger of derailing modern medicine completely. The benefits of an informed medical consumer who researches their symptoms, asks intelligent questions and is an active participant in health care decisions can hardly be questioned. Beyond these changes, the effects of global media on medicine are less clear. Media attention focused on the costs of health care in our country has given rise to incremental change, such as states’ importing drugs from Canada, or the current plan before Congress to use the purchasing power of Medicare to negotiate lower prices for pharmaceuticals. While these plans appear to leverage the global economy for the benefit of the consumer, are we ready to accept drugs shipped in from around the world, of possibly dubious quality? The internet has brought us closer to our drugs; if we decide that we need Viagra, we can now bypass the doctor entirely and order from one of the countless online pharmacies ready to send you the pills from overseas (for more details, check your spam folder). Are we ready for the future where doctors are mostly written out of the picture and we can take our pick of any number of lifestyle-enhancing drugs on the internet that will ship right to our door?

This a la carte perspective on drugs begins to get at the darker side of the union between global media and the pharmaceutical companies. What the drugs companies advertise are essentially false promises: pills alone are not going to make you smarter in school; we do not currently have a pill that reverses the process of aging. Yet these promises are so ubiquitous, people begin to believe them and act on them (one need only look at the statistics for Botox to see how true this is ). This acceptance of the drug company propaganda seems to leave us in a precarious, and possibly untenable situation as we move into the future of medicine: the need to be “better than well”. Those with money will be able to afford new drugs to make themselves smarter, prettier, and happier, while those without will be forced to muddle through with merely the gifts they were born with. While it’s certainly possible that new advances in personalized medicine will reassert the doctor’s dominant role as treatments become based on one’s individual genome, the alternative scenario is certainly not pleasant to think about.

I am a senior cognitive neuroscience concentrator who will be headed to medical school next year, so I offer a rather different academic background through which to interpret the material. I’m currently a DJ at WBRU, so the impact of globalization on media, and where we’ll be getting our information and entertainment in the future is of personal interest to me. I’m also a bit of a technology nerd, as a current employee of Apple, the way in which media affects the market for technology intrigues me. Plus, the subject matter looks fantastic and the class has been highly recommended to me, so I’m hopefully looking forward to the semester.