Bamboozled by Nonsensical Prescription Drug Names? Me too!

A brief guide to the actual meaning of heretofore-meaningless, often misleading sequences of syllabic gobbledygook

Remember the good ol’ days? You were feelin’ kinda puny. So naturally, you went to your friendly family physician. And, at exam’s end, he (or in rare instances, she) would shuffle over to a 3”x4” pad of paper to scribble some indecipherable hieroglyphics …

“Take this for a few days and you’ll be right as rain,” the trusted, white-smocked, rosy cheeked physician would say, handing you the scrip.

Just having that little piece of paper in hand made you feel like you were on the mend. You didn’t ask questions. The doc provided little or no explanation. He (or she) knew best. We trusted that.

Forty years ago, it became legal in the U.S. to advertise prescription drugs on television. At the time, hyping prescribed meds directly to the public seemed a ludicrous proposition.

Why, I couldn’t help but wonder, would any solvent pharmaceutical company squander funds on such foolishness? After all, only physicians can write prescriptions. And while doctors presumably watch TV too, as professionals, they shouldn’t depend on commercials to inform them which medication to prescribe for any specific set of symptoms. Right?

Wrong!

Today, TV viewers are barraged daily by a myriad of prescription drug ads targeted not at doctors, but at folks like you and me. The foolhardy investment I mocked back in the early 80s must be paying off big time for Big Pharma. And every other week it seems, yet another campaign for a newly approved pill or injection pops up to stretch out those interminable commercial breaks.

A few months back, my partner’s nephew sauntered through the living room mindlessly singing, “O, O, O, Ozempic…” Proof positive that this jingle, set neatly upon the tune of the catchy pop-music confection “It’s Magic,” (by Pilot, circa 1975) is definitely doing its job… having ear wormed into the porous, underdeveloped brain of a nineteen-year-old.

But what is Ozempic anyway, besides some made-up, nonsensical word serving to usurp and defile a perfectly…

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