Bad Medicine

This song compares a love affair to a drug addiction and contains many tongue-in-cheek medical analogies ("There ain't no paramedic gonna save this heart attack"). It was the third #1 that Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora wrote with Desmond Child. The trio also penned "You Give Love A Bad Name" and "Livin' On A Prayer." In the '70s, Child was a modestly successful performer with a group called Desmond Child & Rouge. In 1979, he teamed up with Paul Stanley and came up with the hit I Was Made For Lovin' You for Kiss, which put him on the radar as a Rock band hitmaker. His next gig was with Bon Jovi, and it was a lasting relationship, which Child putting his touch on the hooks and choruses to some of the band's most memorable songs. When we spoke with Desmond in 2012, he said that Bon Jovi was a particularly focused band that for the most part stayed away from drugs and other temptations because their work was so important to them. "Those people were always focused on their careers," Child told Songfacts. "That was their high." This spectator view of addiction allowed them to write a hit song with the "love is a drug" theme.

This song was released as the lead single from Bon Jovi's fourth album, New Jersey. It was one of the band's most successful songs, their third #1 in America, following "You Give Love A Bad Name" and "Livin' On A Prayer." Before they settled on the name of their home state for the album title, New Jersey, the band considered Sons Of Beaches and 68 And I Owe You One, which they declined because they didn't want to be seen as comedians.

In a 2010 interview with Music Radar, guitarist and co-songwriter Richie Sambora was asked how his approach to songwriting with Jon Bon Jovi has changed over the years. He replied: "It has not. It's very, very simplistic. We sit down with a couple of acoustics or at a piano, and we believe that you can't polish bulls--t. If I sang 'Livin' On A Prayer' or 'Wanted' or 'I'll Be There For You' or 'Bad Medicine' with nothing, a cappella, you would say, 'Hey, that's a good song.' And that's basically what it comes down to. You can take a song into a studio with a producer and you can put all the bells and whistles all over it, but if you don't have the basic architecture of the song and the foundation of the song properly written. I mean, Jon and I don't walk into the studio with the band without 10 songs that are kind of written."