Watching medicine commercials on television can be scary. And since I’ve been taking a lot of medicines lately, I think I’m getting a bit paranoid.

Maybe you haven’t noticed, but at the end of a medicine commercial they list the possible dangerous side effects. Quite often, just reading that list takes longer than them telling us what good the medicine can do.  And when you buy a medicine, it most often comes with a brochure describing potential side effects which can range from getting a disease that’s worse than the one you started out with on one end of the spectrum to something like depression and the urge to gamble on the other. Then it gets really complex. If you do go gambling and lose, more depression sets in.

Now I realize the pharmaceutical companies are covering their behinds on this. We live in a very litigious society where people file lawsuits at the drop of a hat, particularly if that hat is made of asbestos and falls on someone’s sore toe.

But even with that realization — that these companies are just being extra cautious — it can still be unnerving.

This morning I watched a commercial about a particular medicine, and right after its virtues were extolled they went into the downside effects, which seemed to include everything but cellulite deposits and going bald. Immediately following that commercial comes another one from a law firm that apparently is filing a class-action lawsuit for people who suffered adverse conditions after using a particular medical device. There are a lot of those kinds of commercials, especially in the early morning and on the far-reaching cable channels.

At the moment, I’m taking quite a number of pills as a follow-up to my recent stem cell transplant. If I were to read the possible side effects of all of them at one sitting, I might just go hide in the closet and await the rapture.

I have all of my pills in a little container with the days marked and whether it’s a morning or afternoon medication. This is somewhat traumatic for me because prior to this I only took a pill for my cholesterol. Life was simple. Things change.

Maybe it’s a good thing that the possible side effects are pronounced. But what are your options?  If you’re in pain, you want relief.

When they talk about those side effects, they don’t give you any data about how many times the adverse effects have occurred. But in my case, that number may not be very comforting either. You see my medical procedure was for a form of cancer called amyloidosis. Only eight people out of a million get it. Those are pretty weak odds, but if you are one of the eight …. well that kind of makes you want to play the lottery every day.

If the list of potentially bad side effects doesn’t scare you, the generic names of drugs may cause pause. It’s very difficult to pronounce some of these drugs. I think there must be a committee of people in white coats that meets periodically to come up with these names. If it’s more than four syllables (and it often is) I don’t try very hard to learn to pronounce them. I just write on the label “antibiotic”, “anti-viral” or maybe just “foot hurts.” Heck I had “autologus” wrong from the getgo. I’ll let you look it up.

Now all that said, I applaud those researchers who dedicate their lives to finding relief and cures for our ailments as well as the physicians who administer them. It’s indeed a noble calling.

(Dwain Walden is editor/publisher of The Moultrie Observer, 985-4545. Email: dwain.walden@gaflnews.com)