The colonoscopy has been the butt of jokes among medical procedures for a long time, but it is actually no laughing matter, as the Minnesota Department of Health’s Sage Scopes graphic billboard campaign reveals:

Perhaps the thinking behind the uncomfortable spectacle ads is to put aside embarrassment of the topic with an in-your-face campaign designed to shock Minnesotans into action by taking advantage of certain free screenings to detect early signs of colo-rectal cancer, for women too:

Here is the last one in the billboard advertisement series that I captured with my iPad within the last month, as you can tell from the snowy background:

Hopefully MDH will publish a report on the effectiveness of this campaign, explaining how MDH measured its success.

Finally, for those of you aware of my interest in irony, the last billboard image shown above also leaves me fairly certain that billboard rental is done in a vacuum without knowing about any potentially nearby signage that might create an opposing view on the billboard’s message.