Paul watched this episode live and after he saw this ad, came downstairs and said “Jen, you HAVE to watch this spoof on drugs on SNL.” We went up to our room and I rewound the DVR. I kid you not dear reader, I was rolling on my bed laughing, crying, literal tears coming out of my eyes. The women of SNL have truly nailed it this time! Jenny Hatch
“At a time when the drug industry is facing increasing scrutiny from Congress and the public, the cast of “Saturday Night Live” has weighed in with a hilarious spoof of television drug ads.
The “commercial,” modeled after the real advertising campaign for the birth control pill Seasonale, touts a fake pill, Annuale. The spoof uses similar pill packaging, actors and even the same pink chairs, sneakers and yoga mats depicted in the real ad. Watch the video, posted below, for the over-the-top punchline. One of the funniest lines is in the list of “side effects” that rolls across the screen at the end of the ad.
“Do not take Annuale if you plan to ever become pregnant, as it may turn your baby into a firemonster,’’ the ad says. “In the days around your period, you may develop a leathery tail.’’
The send-up comes at a time of increasing scrutiny of the estimated $5 billion that pharmaceutical giants spend on drug ads aimed at consumers.”
I’m still a little PO’d at Fox news for the way they have been treating Ron Paul, and the fact that they seem to think he recently fell off the planet (but so does the rest of the media),
but they did get this story right, or at least Douglas Kennedy got it right….
Only question is….which one? Prozac? Paxil? Zoloft? Celexa? Seraquil? Lexapro? Effexor? Esipram? Cymbalta? Risperdal? UPDATE: It was Prozac!!! QUOTE:
“Baty said he saw a psychiatrist monthly but stopped taking Prozac a few weeks ago. She said the medicine “made him feel like a zombie.”
But Baty said that recently he was “a little quicker to get annoyed.”
This morning I received an Email from Ann Blake Tracy at the Center for Drug Awareness. She told me about this new Fox News report by Douglas Kennedy.
Here is a link to the article in the Wall Street Journal mentioned in the piece.
Then later in the morning I was flipping channels and watched this scientology hit job on EXTRA, can’t find the video yet, but I have watched so many of these the past few years, you know the sort, using every television trick possible to make Scientology and anyone who believes in it to be a nut job or worse. It always cracks me up to watch these shows and then see the commercials come on….the little Zoloft bubble, etc…They should just say at the beginning of the show, This segment brought to you by Eli Lily.
Anyway, here is a video of Cruise talking to Matt Lauer about Psychiatry. I completely endorse and applaud him for his education, passion, and willingness to take on this most powerful entity.
My regular readers know that I suffered a post partum psychosis after the birth of my first baby and then was hospitalized for six weeks. I was court ordered to eat psychiatric meds for fourteen months, and in the past 18 years I have given birth to four additional children and have not taken one pill for mental illness. Alternative healing restored my brain and has given me a measure of wellness that I once believed would be impossible to achieve.
Here is a link to an article I wrote a couple of years ago about Alternative remedies for Post Partum Depression and Psychosis. Jenny Hatch Tom Cruise is right about Psychiatry:
Although psychiatry is the smallest faction within the health care industry, authorities have estimated that psychiatric fraud accounts for 20 percent of fraudulent health care claims paid annually. This places the annual cost of psychiatric fraud in the tens of billions, ranging up to $40 billion per year, as described at the start of this article.
Investigators routinely find psychiatrists responsible for a disproportionate share of the fraud and corruption within the health care industry.
As far back as 1985, a U.S. Justice Department probe found that while psychiatrists represented only 8 percent of the physicians in the country, they accounted for 18 percent of the crooked doctors suspended from Medicaid programs over a 15-year period — the worst performance of any group in the medical field.
Crimes included charging for therapy when they had only doled out drugs; billing for patients who did not exist; falsely billing for up to 24 hours of therapy per day; and having sex with patients and billing the government for their lust.
Florida Medicare investigators found that 40 percent of all mental health outpatient service billings in 1994 were fraudulent.
And if fines collected by the federal government are an index, psychiatry is responsible for nearly 90 percent of the health care fraud in the United States. Of the $411 million paid in health-care-related fines in 1994, $379 million were paid by psychiatric hospitals.
