You probably don’t know that America is one of only two countries that allows prescription drugs to be advertised on television. Yeah, for people from literally anywhere else (except New Zealand, which is the other country that allows it), commercials for prescription meds are shocking and weird. You could use the prevalence of these ads to try to draw some conclusions about American consumerism and greed. You might even be inclined to dig into the conspiracy theories about Big Pharma paying to keep people sick. Just stop for a minute, though; I need you to focus on this super-fun commercial!

Advertising

This spot is for Invokana, a drug meant to help people with Type 2 Diabetes keep their blood sugar numbers down. At Mediaite, where we spend all day watching cable news, we see this one over and over. Watch now.

Notice anything a little weird? No, not that a woman has a button in her car that flips the world upside-down! How about that from :44 to 1:36 of this 1:47 spot, actors grin and wander around a colorful,

cartoony-looking landscape while a narrator reads quite the list of side effects that range from light-headedness and dehydration to urinary tract infections to, well… nothing good.

Look at that futuristic guy who presses a button and makes a staircase appear! That’s so cool. Also cool is monitoring your symptoms to make sure you don’t get ketoacidosis, which can be life-threatening. Oh, did you see that guy who walked through his TV and ended up on a nature path? That was sick! And you could be, too, if you don’t stay hydrated and tell your doctor if you have severe kidney or liver problems. Whoa! That lady just collapsed an entire section of the grocery store and shrunk the whole thing, kind of like how you may feel that your esophagus is closing up if you experience the difficulty swallowing that some people on Invokana have reported!

Anyway, ask for it by name the next time you go to the doctor. If we learned anything from this ad, it’s that you’ll be smiling 24/7 once you welcome Invokana into your life.

[image via screengrab]

For more from Lindsey, follow her on Twitter or Facebook.

Tags: diabetes, FDA, medicine