There are a lot of things that, much to my embarrassment, I have only learned recently. One thing is that the word “segue” is not “segway.” The other is when to take ibuprofen and when to take acetaminophen. The former is a perfectly acceptable thing to eventually discover; the other is a massive failure of civilization.
Let me explain: I didn’t know segue was spelled like segue because I’d only heard it said aloud. Then one day I stumbled across it in print and realized the error. Then I had to wonder how I had gotten through a lifetime of perfectly varied reading and never come across it, and it occurred to me that it was entirely possible that maybe almost no one was using it. Maybe tons of people had no idea how that word was really spelled. What if scores of writers purposely dodged segue the way you might just reconstruct a sentence when you can’t figure out how to conjugate it correctly.
But this ibuprofen vs. acetaminophen thing? This is a travesty. There is no excuse for the difference between acetaminophen and ibuprofen not being posted at every street corner, disseminated in every learning environment and reiterated by every socializing institution there is. Because the alternative is ignorance. I’ve gone my whole life not knowing the difference between the two in spite of being an active learner, a reader, a user of the Internet, a person who will ask a question to learn more. For shame, civilization. For shame. I blame you.
Or perhaps the real reason I reached for whatever pain reliever was available without question was because I hadn’t engaged with the medical industry all that much. For most of my life we did not have health insurance, so I went to the doctor approximately one time before I was 19, to a walk-in clinic, in elementary school. That’s it. Perhaps my mother did not know the difference, nor did her mother, nor did hers, and we all exist as an unbroken chain of indiscriminate OTC pain reliever users who have reached blindly into medicine cabinets and shoved whatever was there into our gullets none the wiser.
But no. As I’ve moved through the world and met all types of people including those who see doctors routinely, I’ve learned that lots of people have no idea the difference between these two staggeringly common medications taken by millions of people every week.
And I pose this question to you, reader, and the world at large: Whose job it is it to tell the American people when Advil is good and when Tylenol is good? Answer me this. Whose job? Where are us regular non-medical schooled people who may or may not roll up on a doctor sometimes supposed to learn which is which, what is what, why anything exists, and how the hell to correctly numb the pain of existence depending on the injury? Where is this information guarded? Who holds the key? What other things don’t I know? Next you’ll tell me it isn’t perfectly OK to use Neosporin from 2011 even if you didn’t notice it was expired until 2013. Nothing makes sense anymore.
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