Highlights

For me, as a youngster, the best part of going to the Doctor was reading those “Highlights” magazines in the waiting room. They usually featured great picture puzzles that would keep me entertained and distracted until I was called back into an exam room where I would wait, cold and naked, to get a needle jabbed in my butt and a thermometer rammed into an orafice that was designed to be an exit and not an entry.


One of my favorite picture puzzles was where they would present two pictures, side by side, and the reader was asked to determine ‘what is the difference between these two pictures’. For the sake of recreating that medical office fun, I’ve decided to recreate that little game, right here in my blog.

Are you ready for some fun? I hope so!

Here we go:







Picture ‘A’ is a photo of Athlete’s foot vream that my wife purchased at Walmart.

Picture ‘B’ is a tube of Athelete’s Foot Cream that I bought at the local CVS.

So, my eagle-eyed viewers, what are the differences between these two photos?

Give up? Well, just turn your computer monitor upside down and read the fine print bebeath the photos – or just read on.

Difference 1: The Walmart tube is smaller than the CVS tube. In fact, the CVS tube contains almost 3 times as much cream as the Walmart tube.

Difference 2: The WalMart cream says to use it once a day for 4 weeks. The CVS cream says to use it twice a day for 4 weeks.

Difference 3: Picture ‘A’ is a GENERIC drug – basically the non-prescription version of Lotramin. Picture ‘B’ is a name brand prescription drug..

Picture ‘A’ cost my wife 77 cents for the tube. So, for the same amount of cream as Picture ‘B’. It costs a whopping $ 2.42. I don’t really know what Picture ‘B’ costs since I have a prescription plan. However, a Google search shows that I can but the same tube of cream from a website called ‘Cheapo Drugs’ for $ 821.25.

Aren’t these side-by-side puzzles fun?

Both creams have a lot in common as well. Both have a proven track record of curing athelete’s foot. Both do it in about the same amount of time (although the prescription version has to be applied twice a day vs. Once a day for the Walmart cream. But there are more differences between the 2 products that escape the eye.

For instance, Walmart never buys my Podiatrist lunch, or gives him fancy tote bags. They never visit him at his office to extol the virtues of their 77 cent tube of ceam, or scold him for not writing enough prescriptions for their cream.

Oh yes – I just thought up another difference. That tube of Walmart cream costs almost the same amount of money as a cup of McDonalds coffee (and my local Walmart has a Mc Donalds right inside their store. This means that if you were down to your last dollar, you can choose between being sleepy or having itchy feet).

On the other hand, the CVS prescription cream costs more than I paid for my first car.




But, to be fair, I bought that car way back in 1977, and you have to allow for inflation.

I blame Obama for this runaway inflation – don’t you?






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Lazy Days

Yeah, I know. I haven’t posted to my blog lately. It’s a real shame, too. My blog just had it’s 20,000th visitor, and I still keep getting a lot of traffic in spite of my lack of new content.

It’s really not my fault – the lack of posting is due to a newly diagnosed medical condition. It seems I suffer from something called ‘Chronic Laziness Disorder’, or CLD. You say you never heard of CLD? Don’t worry – as soon as Big Pharm comes up with a drug for it, you’ll be seeing commercials for it on ‘The Price is Right’. Rumor has it that Pfizer is partnering with Starbucks and developing a cup of Joe that has twice the caffeine that a normal cup of their ‘over the counter’ coffee has. It will be available only by prescription and cost $25.00 a cup. Leave it to the American Pharmaceutical industry to make a cup of Starbucks even more expensive.



Pfizer is also planning to release a caffeine-enhanced prescription Frapuccino for the summer months that has twice the caffeine and sugar as the regualr stuff. In fact, it will have so much sugar in a cup that it will send many people into a diabetic coma. This is seen by Pfizer as a great cross-market for it’s line of diabetes medicine and glucose meters. Too bad that the prescription Frapuccino will be so expensive that most prescription plans will label it a ‘tier one’ drug with a ludicrously high co-pay. Fortunately, Duncan Donuts will soon offer it’s own prescription ‘Coolata’ at a much lower cost, so your med carriers formulary will allow you to get this drink for only a$20 copay so long as your MB (or Medical Barista) didn’t check off the ‘no substitution’ box on your prescription.

Until these new drugs for my CLD are released, I will have to suffer (and nap) in silence.

Although prescription coffee may sound ludicrous, the idea really isn't that far-fetched. After all, Big Pharm has been offering ‘Prescription Strength’ versions of over-the-counter meds like aspirin, tylenol, and various antacids for years now. And we’ve been blindly paying outrageous fees for them for years, instead of buying the over-the-counter versions at Wal-Mart and doubling up on the dose.

My Podiatrist recently gave me a prescription for Athlete’s Foot cream that sells for close to $300 a tube. Now, my Athlete’s Foot isn’t that bad – in fact, I didn’t even know I had it. (When I was in High School, I never had the makings of a Varsity Athlete - at least that’s what my Uncle Junior used to say).
So why don’t I just buy a $2.00 tube of over-the-counter cream at Wal-Mart? Good question. Luckily, my prescription came with a special copay card that allows me to pay a zero copay for the cream. This way, I can get ‘the good stuff’, and not have to worry about the price – until I’m hit with my new health insurance premiums next year. Like most Americans, I’ll probably follow the advice of ‘The Yardbirds’ and “Live for Today”. In fact, I think that this just might be the next Classic Rock song that’s used in a television commercial – Merck – I’m looking in your direction.


In case you were wondering, this whole diatribe was provoked by a link my buddy PG posted on his Facebook page. What first struck me as funny seemed less farfetched the nore that I watched it.

I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.



Now, let me get back to my nap.....




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