On Building Playgrounds And Baking 1,000 Cupcakes

I recently saw an Orencia commercial (see end of post to watch commercial) that stopped me in my tracks because it is so different from other RA medication commercials. 

The commercial portrays a woman doing everyday things, like turning a doorknob and walking up stairs. 

And I have to wonder.  Is pharma starting to listen to us?

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat in meetings with pharma and the continual  trope from me and other patients is that the commercials don’t represent us and portray the disease in a way that makes the general public not understand the significance of the disease. 

One thing I don’t know is whether the people featured in the commercial actually have RA.  Many pharma companies say they cannot use real patients.  However, Gilenya, a drug that treats multiple sclerosis has done just that and features real patients who are on the medication, including my Stanford Medicine X friend Jamia.

This is definitely a step in the right direction.  This is the sea change that we need.  And it proves that if we raise our voices loud enough and we complain often enough, and we speak as a collective voice, we can get things done.  Change is possible. 

And maybe this seems like a really basic or obvious change.  But I think on the part of pharma, they don’t see it that way.  They have fundamentally changed how they talk about RA and what their medications are realistically able to do.

The commercials out there that show patients building playgrounds also create unrealistic expectations on the part of patients.  And this perpetuates the discourse that patients fail medications, when it reality, medications fail patients.  By showing situations that the majority of patients won’t be able to do on a good day not only makes patients expect that, that is how the medication will work for them, but that when they don’t experience it, that they have failed in some way because it should work for them the way the commercial shows.

I won’t call out here the specific medication whose commercials seemed to offend more than others, because you probably know which one I am talking about.  But I’ve always resented them.  I always wanted to throw my TV out the window when the commercials came on and someone was building a playground or baking 1,000 cupcakes, things that I probably wouldn’t have done pre-RA.  The commercials always left a bad taste in my mouth and felt like false advertising. 

Maybe there’s some bitterness that the medication didn’t work for me and my experience with it was pretty dismal.  But I wasn’t the only one.  And that has bothered me a lot, too.  When patients are traumatized by painful auto injectors, and patients have trouble accessing pre-filled syringes, which still burn, but not as bad as the auto injector, someone should be listening to that, and finding a way to change it.

So maybe this goes beyond commercials.  It speaks to patients having a voice when it comes to the medications that are on the market to treat us, and even medications before they even come to market.  It speaks to patient centricity, and what that means and doesn’t.  Patient centricity means involving patients from go.  It means bringing them into the conversation and keeping them around long enough to make it matter.  It doesn’t mean bringing just a few patients into the fold.  It means actually hiring patients to work for pharma. 

Just because you can’t build a playground or bake 1,000 cupcakes, doesn’t mean that you don’t have a voice.  Every patient matters, regardless of illness severity, and whether medications work for you or not.  Sometimes opening a jar or a door, of climbing a few stairs, is the best we can do.  If medications promise more than that, then that is what they should deliver.  We all have to be realistic.  Granted, climbing stairs and opening jars isn’t sexy, but that’s the reality for so many of us with RA.