Modern malpractice…I mean modern medicine…hurried off my favourite uncle years before his time. It also made my father’s final 10 years even more miserable through misprescribing, iatrogenic idiocy. My own merry misadventures with our exalted public health care system, along with my habit of researching high-tech snake oil, helped inspire cartoons like the one above from 2006. (Fun fact: a John Hopkins study from 2016 suggested medical error was the 3rd biggest killer in the US.)
Anyway! Here’s a cheery toon about a proposed 2015 merger between two porcine pharmaceutical giants. The eye-glazing dollar figure for the merger highlights how insanely profitable such companies are. But a sad update: the two never actually made it to the altar, much less the wedding suite. Such are the ups and downs of shareholder-based romance.
I revisited the hoggish metaphor in this cartoon on the marketing buildup to the now-forgotten 2009 swine flu scourge. Forgotten because the scourge never panned out, though not for lack of corporate enthusiasm.
It’s a fine line between food and drugs. Especially when a chemical substance of dubious safety is branded as a tasty coffee condiment!
I don’t actually recall the news story behind this. However, having once taught in primary school, I recognize that sugar can behave like a drug and should be considered a controlled substance in class!
Okay, this one is definitely more about food than medicine. I came across it again and it made me laugh, so I stuck it in. Your humour mileage may vary.
How surprising that something as philosophically rubbery as “existential angst” can be measured by laboratory calipers! And as a bonus, be found treatable by an over-the-counter drug! Unfortunately, the scientific signal probably got messed up somewhere between the peer review process and The National Post reportage.
Finally, a toon from about ten years back in which I mashed up pharmaceutical profiteering with piracy on the high seas, using a twin cadaceus rather than skull and bones.
So what’s changed since I did those toons? Everything, of course. You simply don’t criticize large pharmaceuticals for any past or present misdeeds, or lampoon them in editorial cartoons (not if you want paying work, that is). Nor do you highlight their governmental proxies or press stenographers. It’s considered unappreciative, or even worse, conspiratorial. The big drug makers have been reimagined as our saviours even though one of the biggest, Pfizer, once paid out the largest criminal fine in US history to the tune of $1.195 billion (no, that number’s not a typo). That 2009 item about payback for fraudulent marketing wasn’t much on the media radar back then, and it certainly isn’t on it now. Down the memory hole!
Brilliant as always, Geoffy. The world needs far more people (journalists) like you. Your fan, Cath M.
Excellent and relevant for these days too. I stopped blindly trusting doctors a few years ago...