This post was stimulated (and you will have to excuse these absolutely inadvertant puns) by an anecdote recently shared with me by my wife.  She and our 15 year old son were watching televsion when a commercial advertisement for Extenze, the ‘Natural Male Enhancement’ popped up.  My son was absolutely dumbfounded and my wife pulled a Jackie Gleason (hmna hmna hmna) attempting to respond to this innocent question. His response was not dissimilar to the one that was asked of parent and physician David Feinberg by his son when an ad for erectile dysfunction treatment was shown during a sporting event.
So, as the teaser to this blogpost asks, “What do erectile dysfunction, the FDA and popular culture have in common.” Popular culture is about the sights and sounds of all that surrounds and permeates our daily lives…advertisements included.  While there have been attempts to estimate the number of advertisements we are exposed to in the course of  our day (print, television and radio), it is probably safe to say that it is a large number, and over the last several decades, the American public has been exposed to more and more ads for medicines for an increasingly large number of physical and medical conditions, both real and socially constructed.