It’s hardly surprising that friends within your Facebook network would share common medical advice such as the best natural remedy to soothe a sore throat, or maybe the side effects of a certain type of birth control.
What is downright astonishing is what one may deem a friend via the popular social networking site might in actuality be a pharmaceutical company. Facebook is making its play for world dominance by becoming the ultimate stomping ground for legitimate political and social discourse.
If that is the case, why shouldn’t medical discourse be allowed to flourish and gain legitimacy through the arch-nemesis MySpace?
Last July, McNeil Pediatrics, manufacturer of the popular, long-acting stimulant drug Concerta, launched its own Attention Deficit Hyperactivity-Disorder Facebook page. The page is intended to offer mothers with children that have been diagnosed with ADHD “practical and credible information.”
I feel bad for the kids whose mothers feel better about their decisions to medicate them by reading a “posted wall comment.”
“After dinner one night my son sat and played with Legos for hours it seemed. He looked so happy, peaceful, and I turned to my husband and said, ‘We did good,'” wrote Michelle Goodman-Beatty, a mother of four, recent medication convert and one of the page’s more than 8,000 “fans.”
Another mom boasts that her daughter has made the honor roll and has “become a more focused dancer.”
I may be pessimistic, but who is benefiting from this page? The child? McNeil Pediatrics?
Or is it the mother who can now sleep easier at night knowing she is showcasing her medicated child’s “progress” to thousands of strangers?
The good people at McNeil Pediatrics who started the page have a decent and understandable reason for creating this self-help page for mothers.
According to company spokeswoman Tricia Geoghegan, “Our research is telling us that these women feel very isolated. We saw these moms going on Facebook. They’re going to WebMD late at night. The Facebook page was designed to put the information in their comfort zone.”
I am not against ADHD treatment; I am against this obvious attempt by a pharmaceutical corporation to sanitize the complicated debate of medicating one’s child.
The tactics used by McNeil Pharmaceutical in bringing this debate to the friendly confines of Facebook are brilliant, yet somewhat manipulative because they are utilizing to their advantage the ultimate facilitator or spokesperson — mothers.
“Mother always knows best,” and this for-profit company is trying to exploit this universalized statement in order to sell medication that has been known to be controversial due to its over-prescribed nature.
Pharmaceutical companies are not our friends in the tangible world or in the cyber world.
There must be a ceiling for corporate relationships such as these. Would you be friends with someone who, before you started the relationship, warned that they may cause you to have sweaty palms, loss of sleep and no appetite?
Hanif Zarrabi is a Middle Eastern history graduate student and a columnist for the Daily Forty-Niner.
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