seems like the ad was superfluous. the doctor treating your friend's condition would be aware of new drugs relevant to your friend's condition. i go to a doctor because i don't know about medicine, i don't want to be educated on medicine from snake oil salesmen.
just to be clear i don't know your friend or their life or their medical condition or if the drug you saw an ad for treats their condition or if you saw an ad for a drug or if your friend has a medical conditon or if you have a friend at all... and i don't know if every event in a chain of events is necessary to the eventual outcome of that chain of events... and i can't see into the alternate reality wherein you didn't see that ad for a drug, to know your friend would've been fine in the end... and so on.
i'm speaking more generally, saying advertising is superfluous to medicine.
By accepting SWAG from the pharma rep, or accepting free trips to conferences sponsored by pharma. If a doctor has not heard about a new drug the their reps just haven't made their way to them yet because they're in a smaller market. The yet is key, eventually a rep will make their way to them. More than likely much sooner than the TV ads run
By researching new drugs? Though sadly at the moment the doctor is also a target of advertising. The point being that this should generally be a pull process driven by a demand (and mediated by neutral review and publication processes) and not a push being driven by a supply (mediated by a process that goes to the highest bidder).
It’s not an either-or situation. A doctor is a human and has a job and a family. I don’t expect my doctor to be spending every second researching everything related to all his patients. There simply isn’t enough time to know everything.
If I wanted that level of care, I expect to pay for a personal physician who only has one patient. Me.
The reality is most of the time my Dr knows more technical info than the patient. But sometimes I know something they don’t. The information asymmetry lasts about 60 seconds before my doctor validates the info against his professional sources.
My doctor is providing a value commiserate with what I pay him.
so in your mind, a pharmaceutical company telling a patient that a drug exists is "advertisement" but a pharma company telling a doctor that a drug exists magically isn't?
The first gets blasted all over the internet to be shoved in the faces of all and sundry.
The second goes quietly and efficiently to the professionals tasked with helping the individuals in society with problems that may directly benefit from new thing.
