Mondays with Mike: Pharma-musicals

Maybe it’s just people of my age who are seeing these things, but there seems to be a spurt of TV ads for various prescription drugs that are mini-musicals. This one, for Jardiance, is probably the most musical-like of these jaunty ads:

Jardiance is one of those drugs for type 2 diabetics that is also being used for weight loss. There must be something about lowering one’s A1C (at test that produces a measure of blood sugar control over time) that really makes people want to get up and dance—for Ozempic ads set characters in motion to some pretty annoying ear-worm music:

On one hand, it’s kind of cool that A1C knowledge is going mainstream—I first learned about it when Beth and I started going out decades ago. Back then it was newish and kind of a novelty and had we mentioned it to friends, we would’ve been greeted by blank stares.

On the other hand, I can’t help but see an incongruity between a serious, chronic condition and the urge to get up and dance. (Some non-prescription drugs, maybe.) I kinda feel like Eli Lilly strikes a more appropriate tone with its ad for its type 2 drug Mounjaro.

Apart from wondering what the meetings about naming these drugs must have been like, I can’t help but also wonder how much they cost to produce, and worse yet, the ad spends these companies make to get them on screens so often. In addition, they all tout their weight loss potential, and you just know that we’re eventually going to learn about how that’s a bad idea (that is, taking it expressly for weight loss and not type 2 diabetes) long after the horse is out of the barn.

In a pretty wealthy nation where lots of people have no health care (save for emergency room visits) or inadequate care and bad insurance coverage, the song and dance is hard to stomach.