It seems like they're practically every other ad on TV: pharmaceutical advertisements. Go ask your doctor about Trotasia so you can treat your bad case of immediate postprandial, upper-abdominal distention.

The problem I have with this is this: the only person who can accurate decide what medicine you should take is your doctor. However, medical advertisements has the effect of, not only spending money that goes straight towards the cost of the drugs your buying, to to encourage people to go to their doctor to demand drugs that they might not even need.

"Wait!" drug makers will say, "we're providing an important service by informing people about important medical conditions!" That may or may not be true. But then, if your "goal" is to inform people about medical conditions, why don't you do just that - inform them about a condition without advertising your product?

That's what I propose a new regulation should be: No company shall be allowed to advertise any pharmaceutical product in any media. Advertisements that I think should be allowed include:

Advertisements that inform about a specific medical condition, but which both identify whether a pharmaceutical company is funding the ad, but which doesn't advertise, recommend, or otherwise identify a specific pharmaceutical treatment.

A person who practices medicine, in an advertisement for their specific service, may advertise the type of treatment they provide, including pharmaceutical products they use. This way, a doctor can say "I use xxxx!" but a pharmaceutical company can't just throw a doctor on TV and be like "hey! we have a doctor saying it!"

Not only would this shift the decision of what medicine to use back to doctors, but it could potentially cut down on most, if not all, of the billions of dollars spent on advertisements. Indeed, pharmaceutical companies reportedly spend more on advertising than actual R&D, and then go out and claim that they have to charge so much so they can create new drugs. I don't think so.