MORE THOUGHTS ON UNITED HEALTH CARE AD

The most recent UnitedHealthCare ad talked about a man who was prescribed two different prescriptions in two different places.  In the ad, he says:' United Health Care caught the error and said I would have been in trouble if I had taken them both.' I deplore this man's lack of attention to his own health care.

Recently I had written a blog with some aspects of the ad that bothered me.  However, I continued to think about the ad and finally connected some dots for myself.  For years as a therapist, I have been telling patients they should not rely on their doctors to keep all their information and urged them to ask questions so they could understand what was prescribed and what it was supposed to do.If this man had talked to his doctor and asked more questions he might have caught the error himself, which would have been safer than taking a chance someone else might find it.

My last blog on the ad commented that the likelihood of catching that prescription error by the insurance company was slim.  While I might be wrong, the ad bothers me because it fosters the illusion that people need not should assume their need to understand their condition and the medicines prescribed for it.  They cannot rely on being protected from doctor's errors by insurance clerks.  Anything which encourages a false dependence troubles me.

Politics seem to be influencing products not approved by the FDA, even when they are natural products which have been sold for years with no complaints,  A company was forced to stop selling a product because it was advertised as being good for health but had not been researched and pulled through the FDA sphincter. All of us need to understand our bodies, what we feed them, and what we ingest to stay healthy.