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Honolulu Lite
AMERICA has gas. And apparently a lot of it. Judging by the number of heartburn medication commercials, we're talking serious telly jelly belly. America is gassing
up pill industryThere's got to be gold in them thar pills or the tummy-ache medication companies would not be spending millions on ads.
Tums, Rolaids, Pepto-Bismol, Maalox, Alka Seltzer and a number of other brands are jockeying for position in the acid reflux revolution.
The question is, what's rotting out America's innards to the point that gas control is a major growth industry?
If this many people are having tummy troubles, maybe we should be concentrating on the fuel that is being fed into the combustion chamber instead of the medicines that are being fed in later to put the fire out.
Obviously, there are going to be people with serious medical problems that manifest themselves in severe gas problems. For them, the off-the-shelf remedies simply won't do. Throwing a couple of Rolaids down the hatch is like shooting a house fire with a garden hose. These people need heavy firepower.
They go for drugs like Propulsid, which sounds more like rocket-booster fuel than medicine. According to a recent news story, some 30 million prescriptions of Propulsid have been written since 1993, representing, I suppose, the consumption of 15 million hotdogs, 4 million taco grandes, 8 million double cheeseburgers and millions of orders of french fries, jumbo-sized.
Unfortunately, the cure was worse than the disease for 70 people, who died after taking Propulsid. Two hundred others suffered irregular heartbeats and other heart problems of the non-fatal variety.
In the big-money world of medical technology, this is considered an acceptable casualty rate. The Food and Drug Administration did issue a warning to Propulsid users to talk to their doctors about whether the threat of heart stoppage was worth the treatment of heartburn. That was good news to Propulsid maker Johnson & Johnson. The FDA could have said that any drug that kills 70 people can't be sold. If the Federal Aviation Administration took the FDA's view of death, there'd have to be several plane crashes before the FAA ordered that a defective plane be overhauled.
The FAA orders an investigation of any fatal accident and orders that all planes affected by a defected part be fixed. It doesn't say, "Hey, considering the millions of passengers who HAVEN'T died, we're doing pretty good."
But the strange thing is we aren't talking about flying, we're talking about HEARTBURN. People are dying because they have gas. And instead of figuring out why millions of supposedly healthy Americans have gas, the drug companies are allowed to make tons of money after the fact, even if a few customers croak along the way.
I'm no doctor, but I know what gives me heartburn: fat. Americans live on a diet of fat now. Fast-food outlets are simply fat dealers. For a long time, I didn't think that you could buy one cheeseburger at a time. I thought they only sold them in twos. With french fries. That inevitably fired up my internal combustion engine to a point that was painful to me and innocent bystanders.
Once I quit eating fat, the heartburn went away. So why doesn't the FDA issue a warning about fast-food fat and other acid-inducing substances? Maybe because of how the drug companies spell "relief": B-I-G-B-U-C-K-S.
Charles Memminger, winner of
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
awards in 1994 and 1992, writes "Honolulu Lite"
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Write to him at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, 96802
or send E-mail to charley@nomayo.com or
71224.113@compuserve.com.
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