Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Meditation on New Language

I need a new language to express my feelings when I read headlines like this on respected medical websites:

Surgery in Drug-Resistant Children? It's Worth It!

I imagine a group of marketers and branders, the people a medical consortium has hired to spice up language, maybe make it more upbeat or appealing in the way that television ads for drugs show people running through fields of flowers even as a litany of side effects are listed. Perhaps these people -- the ones in the rooms brainstorming, the editors of medical websites -- not the ones running through fields or having seizures or being constipated -- are the same experts who come up with pharmaceutical drug names -- Lyrica to conjure soothing musical notes instead of addiction or constant diarrhea or Banzel with its suggestion of a premier fashion house for accessories instead of an antiepileptic whose side effects include increased seizures and psychotic behavior. How about Fycompa with that tiny little nod to coma, like Fie On That Seizure-Induced Coma! Its side effects include increasing belligerent behavior and aggression, even homicidal ideation.

There's the language assigned to pharmaceutical side effects: irritability for psychotic, behavioral disturbances for head-banging or clawing one's skin to blood, increased secretions for drooling cups of liquid, and insomnia for never sleeping again.

Drug-resistant children is a phrase that implicates the child, doesn't it? It smoothes out the anxiety and insanity inherent and provoked by an inefficient treatment. It's language that covers for hideous drugs that don't work for shit to control seizures in children.

The degradation of language.

No more plums in the icebox. This is just to say.

How casual it all sounds, in this, arguably, well-intended iteration.

Brian Surgery!

It’s worth it!

There shouldn't be exclamation marks after brain surgery but rather a new sign from a new language that amplifies cutting into the brain of your child and removing a part of it, her, him, they.

Actually, I don’t need a new language to describe my feelings. You can probably surmise them. No probably. You surmise them. Your gift for recognizing irony is intact, Reader, if you’ve been coming here a while.  

We need a new language to discuss these medical things.  

We need a new language to express things like brain surgery for children — a language that could encompass possibility, gravity, and hope but also fuckery and absurdity. 

Also, specificity.

The possibility, gravity, fuckery, absurdity and hope of brain surgery.

so much depends upon a red wheel
barrow glazed with rain water beside the
white chickens

William Carlos Williams


  1. William Carlos Williams made words into art.
    The people who create those ads, those articles, make words into pornography.

  2. Drug advertising sickens me. I worked one one project for a pharmaceutical company that was trying to take an existing drug and market it to those with psoriatic arthritis. One side effect is lymphoma.i was so nauseated watching drs examine psoriasis patients with thick rubber gloves that I nearly fainted twice - and I mean that literally. The drug is on the market - I’m sure you’ve seen the commercial. I will never work for a pharma company again.They and the drs couldn’t give a hoot about side effects and will deny them while you’re walking around barely able to stand. I know this personally and I’m not sick! I can only imagine what a non-verbal Sophie and others like her must feel and mentally and physically. It’s absolutely horrific and I’m sorry. Joanne

  3. I have no words for the horror of this but I am grateful you do and that you keep writing them. Oh Elizabeth. It’s so fucked up.

  4. We are being asked to BUY so many things.

  5. Great post Elizabeth! Reminds me of another good quote: "Language is a virus" - William Burroughs (and song by Laurie Anderson). Also, the correct flow of the WCW poem is:

    so much depends

    a red wheel

    glazed with rain

    beside the white

  6. OMG.

    I am automatically skeptical of any headline containing an exclamation point. That usually indicates the story is crap.

  7. I watched a new horror series on Amazon Prime entitled Lore. It details different urban legends and presents their origin and how the legend affected those involved. By far the most frightening one was "Echoes" which followed the introduction of doing lobotomies on the mentally ill. It was CHILLING. It was touted as a "miracle cure". Kind of makes you wonder what "cures" we'll be learning about 50 years from now huh?

  8. I'm not a fan of drug advertising on TV. We have to watch it when we watch American channels but we don't have it here. It's not just big pharma though, it's medicine in general. They tend to gloss over difficulties, down play side effects. Even my own doctor whom I trust looks at me skeptically when I tell her taking Pepcid makes me feel suicidal. Or that diclofenac stops me from sleeping.

    I always tell my patients that they don't have to do anything they don't want to. It's their body. A doctor's opinion is just that, an opinion. They have a lot of education and experience but it's still only an opinion.

  9. The word 'side' in side effects is what conned me at first. As in: something by the side like a small side dish while you tackle the big one, your disease - when in reality you stagger into a whole new nightmare of new symptoms.

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  12. Apologies for multiple comments, something to do with my phone and my clumsy fingers.

    Re side effects of drugs and commercial interests of pharma industry, check out David Healy (the psychiatrist and writer, not the actor) and esp. this website: https://rxisk.org/

    He also has a blog: https://davidhealy.org/blog/

    I once knew David before he became a scientist but we have lost touch.

  13. Making anything that they know to be potentially horrific sound appealing enough, that those desperate enough for relief, for cures, for Life itself will be willing to take the risks is what I Hate most about Western Medicine! My preferred Language for such Marketing, Branding and Profiting has been mostly relegated to profanity... especially after watching those ridiculously intentionally deceptive commercials or reading the articles promoting it all!



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