The first “real” drug I was on was Cymbalta. As I was leaving the office with my prescription, I noticed a Cymbalta clock on the wall. And then Cymbalta notepads on the counter.
That’s pretty normal for any doctor’s office. There is almost certainly items from other brands all over the back area where the patients don’t go, too. Drug reps go hard on the cheap freebies so the office will always have a reminder that their drug exists. If you ever see someone in the waiting room who is particularly attractive and dressed far nicer than average, that is usually a rep who is there to drop more goodies and shill their drug. As I understand it, it’s a very lucrative job.
Watch Painkiller on Netflix.
That would just make more more depressed than I already am.
May I interest you in some drugs we’re pedalling for a multi-billion dollar corporation?
Peddling.
Pedalling would be for a bicycle and the like.
You sound like you need some grade A designer drugs! There’s nothing like overdosing on synthetic heroin while riding your bike!
Only if I can go on a cruise, too!
Fuck that. They aren’t coming near my office. I even bring my own blank lanyard to medical conferences because i’m not gonna wear one with pharma company logos printed on them.
Tldr: then I took Prozac and I was fine.
A while back my usual social anxiety kinda morphed into generalized anxiety disorder and I started having panic attacks, and that was bad of course, and I was in a permanent state of fear of…something/everything. And that was bad too of course.
But the really terrible thing was how after about a year and a half of that constant fear, my sense of reality began to “come unglued”. At the time I remember marveling at how on-the-nose those common phrases turned out to be. Things like “stripped a gear, came unglued, had a screw loose…” felt exactly like what had happened to me.
Absolutely nothing felt “real” or “anchored” or familiar after awhile. I can’t really convey the horror of it or the fear that I would never be able to feel “real” again. My thoughts started turning towards the question of “how can I persist like this? How am I going to keep from having to kill myself?”
Then I started taking a lot of Prozac and I was more or less fine in a few months. So yeah my experience with these drugs has been one of abject salvation. They may not be well understood, which probably leads to the shotgun method, but they’re beautiful in my eyes.
I know someone that started prozac a few years ago. Completely life changing. She orders coffee by herself now and doesn’t flee a store when someone asks if they can help her.
I prescribe a lot of fluoxetine (Prozac). I was always very skeptical about it, but it’s very remarkable. I could ask my med students to guess which patients are on the drug and they could tell. (If someone sees me, they have a good reasons to be anxious)
That’s the cool thing about medicine, you don’t “do” medicine-- you practice medicine.
And anytime you prescribe a drug, you are starting a trial. Because you really don’t know how it will do to that one patient. Experience may tell you that it should do what you expect it to do, (because it almost always does). But it could only partially work or do nothing, or have varying side affects, or even kill you patient.
As an ER director of a hospital once told me, “Despite all we think we know and all we think we can do for a patient. It still mostly boils down to keeping the patient amused and letting nature take it’s course.”
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Patient suddenly dies
Doctor: … damn it, I didn’t get my straight line
I thought this comic was made by AI for a bit cuz all the words are fake.
