- We've decided (in the US at least, but most everywhere short of a few communist or communist-adjacent countries) that the way we incentivize and reward drug researchers is by having them work for pharmaceutical companies that profit on the free market—and in particular that drugs are valuable to society and worth researching in proportion to how much profit they bring.
- If you don't know that a certain medical condition is a medical condition, you might not seek treatment for it, or you might not recognize it at all. In particular, rare diseases by their nature are those that many doctors don't know how to diagnose, and new treatments by their nature won't have been part of those doctors' curriculum.
- There are few means of reliably pushing information to the general public outside of advertising.
Therefore advertising "talk to your doctor about this condition" (and perhaps "whether certain drugs might be right for you") is both a rational / logical response within this framework and exactly what the framework wants you to do.
If we want to get rid of it, let's redesign the framework: reward drug researchers in some way other than profits, or find out how to inform either doctors or patients about new treatments in some other way.
Maybe it’s a symptom of lacking a national healthcare system but we manage fine without drug advertising in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. In our case advertising and sales are aimed towards Doctors.
My friend who is an independent prescribing nurse in the NHS [which means she can go off-piste like a regular doctor writing arbitrary prescriptions, she's not just limited to a handful of standard recipes to solve well understood problems] says after she qualified her blow-out birthday party was entirely paid for by drug reps out of their marketing budgets. These days that would get them fired, and the best you can hope for is stress toys, stationery, that sort of thing.
But I wasn't there to watch TV so I filed it as the next weird cultural artifact where the USA is in fact exactly as advertised worldwide on TV and film instead of made-up by a crazy screenwriter :)
So it's illegal in Norway for my 12-year-old cousin to beat my highscore in Pacman?
Gaming, as in like video games and board games are banned? Seriously?
However, I think it’s completely reasonable to say talk to your doctor about ED or whatever. If there is only one treatment they seem similar, but when several options exist people should not be pushing for a specific drug based on an ad campaign.