Researchers at a major biological laboratory have announced an important new medication they believe will revolutionize the pharmaceutical industry. At an almost breathless announcement at a hastily called press conference, the researchers said the medication has been in development for days, if not weeks.
“I’ve not seen anything like it in all the years I’ve been involved in medical research,” said Dr. Tim Watney of the Santa Monica Sickness & What Ails You Center (SMS&WAYC) based in Yorba Linda. “We talk a lot about miracle drugs, but I believe this one is going to be the real deal.”
The pill was fast-tracked by the FDA in the waning days of the Bush Administration, in order to get it to market and the balance sheets in the shortest possible time.
“There’s only one minor hitch to the new medication as we see it currently,” Watney explained. “We haven’t actually identified a disease or disorder for which the new medication may be applied.”
Watney said the efficacy trials conducted for the new medication resulted in significantly high responses from various test groups.
“All subjects reported that taking the medication at recommended dosages made them ‘feel better,’ but many also reported they weren’t feeling all that bad in the first place,” Watney said.
In addition to the lack of identification of a specific ailment, the new medication also lacks a brand name. “This is what you get when you rush things and forget to include the advertising department during the initial research phase,” said Watney.
Watney said the new research was driven by the possibility of health care reform, and the fact that reform would insure the 47 million Americans currently uninsured.
“Forty-seven million new customers is a huge surge in the market,” Watney said. “There’s got to be something wrong with all of them. We just have to figure out what it is, frighten them and then reassure them that help is on the way in the form of a new pill.”
Critics of the U.S. health industry say this episode should serve as a clarion call for reform in the industry. “You can’t have good medicine without good marketing,” notes Susan Roth, a specialist in multi-media medicine and author of the book, Of Course You’re Sick, You Just Haven’t Seen It on TV Yet.
“You think people with the jimmie-legs actually believed they had anything wrong with them prior to the industry’s highly-successful Restless Leg Syndrome campaign?”
European health-care experts continue to marvel at the capability of the U.S. drug industry to create new therapies and then disorders to match.
“It’s just not possible in most European countries,” says Dr. George Orwell of the Copenhagen Institute of Common Sense. “Europeans tend to eat natural foods that we grow ourselves, live life at a slower, less stressful pace and take afternoon naps and long vacations. You could never convince such well-adjusted people that there could possibly be so much wrong with them as they can in America.”
Orwell said that when Europeans do get “out of sorts,” they simply “take it easy for a while, you know like when a dog is ill.”
Watney says such a system would never work in the United States. “The American people are used to just letting themselves go and then running off to the nearest pharmacy for an array of brightly colored pills that allows them to just keep letting go. It’s what has helped create the greatest health-care system in the world.”
Watney says SMS&WAYC is currently investigating such chronic conditions as morning breath, hat hair and “whatever it might be that causes people, especially men, to miss a belt loop” as possible disorders for which their new medication might prove an effective therapy.
