The Little Purple Pill

As I have procrastinating my grant-writing to an impressive degree over the past week or so, I thought I'd procrastinate further and spout out a few factoids from the book I'm currently reading: Blood and Guts by Roy Porter. It's a brief history of medicine, a topic about which I recently decided most doctors (myself included) don't know enough about.

One of the interesting aspects of the book that I’ve enjoyed thinking about is just how much the role of the physician has evolved with respect to a social context through the ages. As an example, try on this statistic for size: the average American visited the doctor 2.9 times a year in 1930; by 2000 this had doubled. Why is this so? One might think that now we have many more effective medications and can cure or help medical conditions more frequently than we were able to do in 1930. On the other hand, such breakthroughs might otherwise be expected to lead to a healthier society, and therefore shouldn’t need to visit the doctor so much. I think the difference is largely explained by what people expect when they go see a doctor. Nowadays there is so much marketing on television—e.g., “Ask your doctor about the little purple pill!”—that many people feel that in order to get the best medical care available they need to focus on these issues, rather than the truly important ones (like quitting smoking, for instance).