HEALTH & FITNESS

coping

wellness

GRIEF-WRITTEN from page 31

The Power Of
Advertising

piece this together into a book"
happened later.

Booking It

Yet Sabrina was well into the
memoir when her mother came up
with her own concept for a book.
Monni turned to photography, her
passion since high school, where
she remembers flooding a floor of
Southfield High when the sink in the
school's darkroom overflowed. "I
was banned from the darkroom for
a month," she says.
In the book's preface, Monni
writes: "Through this difficult time,
I gradually became more aware of
others' losses and their grief. My
focus soon turned to the Detroit-
area Holocaust survivors, many now
alone, living at poverty level."
The book would not only honor
local survivors, but its proceeds
could help those in need.
Like Sabrina, "My biggest fear
was that I would forget Miya,"
Monni says. "Talking to the survi-
vors reassured me. After all these
years, they still remembered and
they did get on with their lives."
Her mother often found herself
crying along with the survivors,
some of whom had never told
their story before. But for Sabrina,
chronicling their memories was less
traumatic than exploring her own.
"I'm exposing their lives, but in
my memoir I'm exposing mine," she
says.

Healthful Expression

"It's very beautiful," says Elana
Goell-Varkovitzky, Ph.D., a Franklin
clinical psychologist, of the wom-
en's use of their talents to deal with
grief. "It's an expression of health.
"Death generally is a mystery for
us. Suicide is 10 times more mys-
terious, and shocking and painful,"
says Goell-Varkovitzky, who is a fol-
lower of Viktor Frankl, the Austrian
neurologist and psychiatrist who
was a Holocaust survivor. "Our brain
is wired to figure things out.
"The memoir is, for sure, a very
intelligent attempt to make sense of
the death." And behind both books,
she says, "is a very Jewish attempt
to make a memory, to speak her
name and tell the story."
For Monni, the Holocaust survi-
vors "know her pain and she knows
theirs," Goell-Varkovitzky says. "She
found something not only that she
can identify with, but she is serving
a purpose. She's bringing good to

32

T

Monni Must and her youngest

daughter Sabrina are featured at

the upcoming Jewish Community

Center's 58th annual Jewish Book

Fair.

people."
"Tragedies do happen," says
Monni. "It's all about what you do
with your experience. Everybody
has their own way of grieving."
"I wrote because I wanted to
understand what the experience is
of losing someone that close," says
Sabrina, a news intern at National
Public Radio station WDET in
Detroit.
"Our family and friends were
afraid to come over," Sabrina says.
"I want someone who has never
experienced this type of loss to
know what it is like for their own
growth. It's humanizing the experi-
ence of suicide. It's making that
anything someone does to grieve
should be okay."
"I was extremely impressed for
a first-time young writer to have
that kind of insight into her feelings
and her family's feelings," says Gail
Fisher, a West Bloomfield resident,
who has read hundreds of books as
a co-chair of the Jewish Book Fair
for the past six years.
This is a unique situation for the
Book Fair — to have two members
of the same family involved in two
different books, Fisher says.

Sabrina Must will present
MUST • GIRLS • LOVE at 1 p.m.,
Wednesday, Nov. 11, and Monni
Must and Sabrina Must will dis-
cuss "Living Witnesses: Faces
of the Holocaust" at 11:30 a.m.
Sunday, Nov. 15. Both sessions
are at the JCC in West Bloom-
field.

hrough television, radio and
magazine advertisements,
I have learned that I should
talk to my doctor to obtain
the latest and greatest drug to relieve
my symptoms if I'm depressed, am
restricted in my activities because of
arthritis or asthma, have
osteoporosis, have high
cholesterol or have indi-
gestion.
As a pharmacist, I find
these direct-to-consumer
(DTC) advertisements a
mixed blessing. Regulation
for DTC advertising into
broadcast and electronic
media occurred in 1997,
opening the floodgates for
pharmaceutical companies
to reach the public and
provide valuable information about their
products. DTC advertising is extremely
effective in increasing awareness of
specific treatments that are available.
However, as a result of these adver-
tisements, drug sales have increased,
causing health care and prescription
costs to rise dramatically.
Billions of dollars are spent annu-
ally promoting drug
sales. According to
IMS Health (www.
imshealth.com ),
more than $4.2 bil-
lion was spent on
DTC advertising
in 2005, a sharp
increase from $985
million in 1996. I was
shocked to read the
article by Brownfield
et. al. in the
Journal of Health
Communication that
in a one-week period
in Atlanta, there were 1,300 advertise-
ments broadcast over three networks
for over-the-counter and prescription
drugs. The authors concluded that in
the United States, for every minute an
adult patient spends with their doctor,
they may have been exposed to 100
minutes of DTC advertising.
Pharmaceutical companies are
coming under scrutiny to assure the
information they present is accurate.
The drug company Pfizer spent $260
billion on an ad campaign using Robert
Jarvik, introduced as "inventor of the
artificial heart," recommending a par-

ticular drug to lower cholesterol. Sales
for the drug soared.
However, after additional investiga-
tion, it turns out Robert Jarvik is not a
licensed physician and is not even the
inventor of the artificial heart. Efforts
are now under way to assure the
actors endorsing the products
are legitimate.
The manufacturer ads that
reach almost 90 percent of
consumers have a profound
effect. Patients frequently go
to their physician and specifi-
cally ask for a brand-name
drug to treat a condition they
have identified with from one
of the DTC advertisements.
In many instances, this will
be the impetus for a good dis-
cussion to take place between
the patient and health care professional
regarding best treatment options,
which is very valuable. However,
many physicians often prescribe the
medication the patient asked for by
name because they believe the patient
expects to receive that particular drug,
not because it is necessarily the most
effective treatment.
With health care and
prescription costs ris-
ing, the impact of DTC
advertising is of great
concern. More often than
not, generic medica-
tions can be safely and
effectively used as an
alternative to the newer,
brand-name drugs. The
benefit of using thera-
peutic equivalents is a
tremendous cost savings
to the patient and health
care system overall.
DTC advertising is
beneficial if it brings patients in to see
their doctors for a condition that oth-
erwise may have gone untreated. The
next time you identify a symptom that
requires treatment, ask your health care
professional what is recommended
based on the latest clinical trials and
evidence. You are more likely to receive
rational, cost-effective treatment as
a result of evidence-based medicine
rather than flashy ad campaigns. 1_

With health care
and prescription
costs rising, the
impact of direct-
to-consumer
advertising is of
great concern

Julie Berman, PharmD, is a clinical specialist

in drug information at Detroit Receiving

Hospital.