There's an advert on TV in the UK at the moment which really annoys my wife. I won't name the company concerned, but it's for a pain killer. The series of ads shows various people who, in their various ways, living life to the full. Their love of speed, or filming animals, or making pretentious adverts, isn't going to be stopped by a bit of pain. Oh no. Not that they're going to tough it out in the way that might suggest. They're going to take pain killers. Wimps. The tag line for the ad is 'Don't let pain get in your way'. At least, I assume that's the tagline, because at this point my wife threw a brick at the screen.

The point, of course, for millions like my wife, is that they can't live a life free of pain. She is currently on, if I remember rightly, three different pain killers doing different jobs which, between the three of them, make some impact on her pain. But not much. And this combination has taken years of experimentation to work out. Pain relief from people who suffer serious and constant pain isn't as easy as all that. Very often it isn't even doable, they just have to try and live with the pain in a way all the weedy types in the adverts aren't able to.

Of course drug companies might argue, with some justification, that they aren't marketing their drug as something for people who have serious pain problems. Well… they sort of are. 'Targets pain fast' there's another ad line for you. No it doesn't. 'Targets some pain fast'. 'Targets mild pain fast'. These are specific enough lines to make the argument work, but you'll never see one. Who wants to start an ad for pain killers by telling you that the pain you want killing isn't all that bad? No, much better to big it up, if you're going to categorise at all. Which brings me, in a momentary but entirely logical segue, to our next offender.

There is a company, actually there are probably several, who market their product as preventing 'colds and flu'. Nope, sorry, you can't have that one either. Colds, yes, flu, no. If it did, then the thousands of jabs people are annually given would be pointless, really, and they aren't. The problem here is that you obviously want to expand your market as widely as possible and so you say 'flu-like symptoms' which is twaddle and people end up not properly understanding the difference between colds and flu. Nice work, drug companies.

Now again the drug companies might protest that it's not their job to educate people about their health, but they do spend vast amounts on advertising their products on the strength of promises that really undermine people's understanding of the severity of the things they claim to be able to conquer. To put it simply: telling someone you can fix flu with some powdery stuff in hot water is often going to make them think that flu is just a bad cold. Which it isn't. Telling someone that they shouldn't let pain stop them runs the horrendously high risk of giving people the false impression that people who are stopped by pain are: a) not taking the right pain killers; b) wimps or; c) faking.

So that's why my wife gets so hacked off and what my point is, this week. Your over-the-counter pain killers are fine drugs and will work wonders with the sort of pain most people have to deal with most of the time. But pain is a little word for a big world of hurt. I invite people with far finer medical knowledge than me to refute the following statement, but until they do: There is no drug in the world that can completely cure anything.

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