How can he tie music into prescription drugs? Simply.

The Grammy awards are being given out tonight. I think I've expressed my opinion on this before, (see Grammys Schmammys) but it bears repeating. The Grammy's are a sham of a fraud. I've managed to distance myself from popular music over the past few years, so I couldn't tell you the relevance of who is nominated this year, but I can tell you that I have no doubt that the nominees don't represent the best music of the past year. That's experience talking.

Just like parking lots are never replaced by parks, so are the Grammy awards never going to be about the best music. One of the many things that bothers me about it is the way music is categorized. Alternative, pop, rap ... I hate categories. Doctors do not, however ...

WASHINGTON – Two drugmakers spent hundreds of millions of dollars last year to raise awareness of a murky illness, helping boost sales of pills recently approved as treatments and drowning out unresolved questions — including whether it's a real disease at all. Key components of the industry-funded buzz over the pain-and-fatigue ailment fibromyalgia are grants - more than $6 million donated by drugmakers Eli Lilly and Pfizer in the first three quarters of 2008 - to nonprofit groups for medical conferences and educational campaigns, an Associated Press analysis found.

Proving (at least for now) what I've always thought and said about drugs that are marketed to treat made-up diseases or conditions that aren't really diseases, like peeing too much or leg pain.

Many doctors and patients say the drugmakers are educating the medical establishment about a misunderstood illness, much as they did with depression in the 1980s. Those with fibromyalgia have often had to fight perceptions that they are hypochondriacs, or even faking their pain.
But critics say the companies are hyping fibromyalgia along with their treatments, and that the grantmaking is a textbook example of how drugmakers unduly influence doctors and patients

Ask your doctor, they tell us. Sure.

But some say the grants' influence goes much further than dollar figures suggest. Such efforts steer attention to diseases, influencing patients and doctors and making diagnosis more frequent, they say. "The underlying purpose here is really marketing, and they do that by sponsoring symposia and hiring physicians to give lectures and prepare materials," said Wolfe, who directs the National Data Bank for Rheumatic Diseases in Wichita, Kansas. Similar criticisms have dogged drugmakers' marketing of medicines for overactive bladder and restless legs syndrome.
Many of the grants go to educational programs for doctors that feature seminars on the latest treatments and discoveries.

I told you! Now, maybe you'll listen when I rant. It's all about marketing, which explains those commercials. Overactive bladder, my ass. They tell us to drink 64 ounces of water a day because it's "good for us" then market a drug that keeps us from peeing. See?

After 30 years of studying the ailment, rheumatologist Dr. Don Goldenberg says fibromyalgia is still a "murky area."
"Doctors need labels and patients need labels," said Goldenberg, a professor of medicine at Tufts University. "In general, it's just more satisfying to tell people, 'You have X,' rather than, 'You have pain.'"
While Goldenberg continues to diagnose patients with fibromyalgia, some of his colleagues have stopped, saying the condition is a catchall covering a range of symptoms. Dr. Nortin Hadler says telling people they have fibromyalgia can actually doom them to a life of suffering by reinforcing the idea that they have an incurable disease.

Doom them to a life of suffering ... and a life of taking prescription drugs. Wake up, people.

Fibromyalgia. It even sounds made up. Because it is. The fact that it doesn't show up in my spell-check should be all you need to know.