Dr farrago4/7/2023 One favorite: an ad for Sexapro, which erases sex drive. Marc Grobman, an internist in Wilmington, Del., who displays the fake ads in his drug sample cabinet. “It’s sophomoric, it’s black, it’s dark,” said Dr. He is The American Patient.”Ī doctor’s want ad seeks “a corrupt pharmacologist,” able to “create and mass-produce tablets made of useless and harmless compounds, and be willing to sell them labeled as narcotics and/or fibromyalgia treatments.”Īnd in a parody of opponents of Gardasil, the vaccine given to girls to prevent the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus, Placebo Journal advertises “Godasil the first and only faith-based vaccine,” which “uses a higher power to bring about immunity for your little girl.” Farrago’s then-employer, a health system, when he printed a physician survey from the fictitious SickNa HealthCare, its logo like Cigna’s tree, but full of dead leaves.ĭoctors and patients are fair game, too. It loves jabbing Big Pharma and insurers in 2005 Cigna HealthCare complained to Dr. They’d leave and feel good, but I’d go home with 25 monkeys.”įancying itself the Mad magazine of the medical world, Placebo Journal features “True Stories of Medicine” and odd-looking X-rays submitted by doctors, as well as sections like “My Favorite Munchausen,” about patients who invent or exaggerate medical problems. “Everybody’s got a monkey on their back, and they want to give you their monkey. “I guess I was burning out in this job,” he said. Farrago went on to create a short-lived Web venture to stream university medical talks to doctors, and then, 10 years ago, he started Placebo Journal. It caught on, and was accepted in 2001 into the Baseball Hall of Fame.ĭr. Alomar using it during a division series game. Alomar’s orthopedic surgeon, and after first being told “he doesn’t like it,” he noticed Mr. (One said he would use it to defecate in the woods.) Then he read about the knee surgery of the Cleveland Indians catcher Sandy Alomar Jr. Farrago obsessively hawked it at spring training and to trainers, many of whom “were really rude,” he said. Thinking it would help baseball catchers, Dr. Voilà, a gizmo was born: the Knee Saver, a foam wedge to cushion one’s crouch. Farrago squatted to work on an electrical outlet, and to ease pain from a blown-out knee, “I put some towels behind my leg,” he said. He became a sports medicine trainer working with boxers, but after one of his boxers got pelted with urine-filled bottles while fighting in Mexico, “I kind of knew it was not my thing,” he said, although he has remained close friends with the boxer Lou Savarese. “The goal is to take viewers into both of Doug’s lives: the hard-working family practice physician who does everything he can to help his patients get well and stay that way, and the self-described ‘King of Medicine’ who uses his satirical skills to take on a health care system,” according to Bruce Halford, a co-producer with Jeff Mackler. Farrago would parachute into communities around the country and help overstretched family doctors care for patients for several days: sort of a medical “Supernanny.” The producers are pitching a reality show in which Dr. Farrago and two television producers succeed with their latest project, people could be seeing a different side of him. They just want to take this on the toilet bowl and laugh.”īut if Dr. They don’t want to do differential diagnosis and read through complex cases. Ten thousand subscribers, he says, pay $28 a year for Placebo Journal, which is published every two months and skewers the health care system’s half-baked mistakes, pokes fun at doctors, patients, insurers and drug companies, or just goes for the gross-out. “I pride myself on a lot of the lowbrow stuff,” Dr. And there were the bumper sticker slogans in Placebo Journal: “My other car was lost in a malpractice suit” and “Maybe Hippocrates was wrong?” Not to mention the magazine’s selection of sexually transmitted disease greeting cards: “Maybe we will date some more, get married and have babies, but until then I think you should know that I have a roaring case of scabies.”
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