Madam, - I thought I'd seen it all. Provigil, ordinarily prescribed for narcolepsy, a condition in which sufferers can involuntarily fall asleep for periods during the day, is on its way to becoming one of the new lifestyle pills.
It is used by some frequent transatlantic flyers hoping to reverse their feelings of jet-lag, allowing them to pack in even more flights by masking sleepiness.
A new "exercise pill", known as GW501516, undergoing trials for use as a cholesterol lowering agent, was found to speed up the metabolism, prevent fatigue, and increase the rate at which the body burns fat in the absence of exercise. Good news for couch potatoes hoping to lose weight without having to move! But there is worse. According to the Sunday Times, the race is on to market drugs that will increase women's libido, particularly career women's, neutralising the effect of those long working hours, family pressures and emotional problems by influencing hormonal pathways in the brain.
Dr Mike Wyllie, a member of the WHO committee which reviews trials of such drugs, summed up the good news: "Very soon there will be more than 20 drugs in the pipeline for female sexual dysfunction." When did being disinterested in sex because of exhaustion become a dysfunction? Does this kind of implication worry anyone else?
There is an element of insanity creeping in when problems of living are subtly being medicalised, and re-labelled as diseases and disorders. In the wake of such repackaging, highly motivated pharmaceutical companies with enormous vested interests fund research to develop just the drug to correct it.
Modern society has already seen feelings of disillusionment, disconnection and deep unhappiness repackaged as depression, for which a plethora of mood-elevating drugs - "uppers" - have been marketed. And fear is now known as "anxiety". Watch the space to see what will be next. A pill for outbursts of anger, an antidote to loneliness, agents to boost self-esteem? One can only wonder what their new medical names will be.
These drugs all have potential serious side-effects, which can in turn create other medical states such as insomnia, impotence, heart disease and strokes. But their most insidious effect - the goal of all advertising - is the changing of cultural attitudes. By medicalising emotional states and suggesting the brain needs adjusting through drugs this approach diverts the focus from the real cause of these problems, the individual's troubled mind.
Wouldn't it be more logical to explore ways to help people deal with their life problems in healthier ways, and to encourage society to make changes if those are necessary? Have we become so dumbed down and reliant on the quick fix that we will indiscriminately take anything now, as long as it does the trick, no matter what the final cost? - Yours, etc,
Dr ÁINE TUBRIDY, Institute of Psychosocial Medicine, Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin.