So I see this drug company commerical for acid-reflux treatment, and it hits me.

[SheilaT]

36. I don't have a TV, so I miss almost all of the commercials everyone else sees.

It really makes a difference.

There are any number of real physical conditions that are out there and need to be dealt with. But there are even more fake conditions that we're led to think we have if we see the commercials.

When I was much younger, and in my 20's, I had an ongoing problem with acid reflux. It eventually went away, although I have no idea why or how. I think perhaps (for me, and this simply may not be true of anyone else) that dieting, and keeping my weight down to an expected level may have had a lot to do with it. Maybe not. But I can say that for several years I had acid reflux on a regular basis, and it just went away. I have no idea why. I wasn't taking any medication, made no major changes in my diet, but it disappeared. And it never came back.

Too bad I don't know why, because perhaps I could package that as the miracle cure.

Sometimes, things go wrong. Sometimes, things get better. Sometimes, we can figure out why. But not always.

I do think that it's far too easy to be bamboozled by ads on TV to think we need a medication that we don't. Or the three page ads in magazines. OMG! Have you seen those? I can't even begin to imagine reading them all the way through. I can even less imagine why we need a three page ad to convince us we need to take some sort of medication for a condition we never knew we had.