Ask your doctor about...

I suppose this doesn't happen in the United Kingdom and other places where television is commercial-free, but in the good old U S of A commercials are ubiquitous (for readers in Alabama, that means everywhere) and thus a never-ending source of irritation.

Commercials that particularly offend my sensibilities are the ones hawking the wares of the big pharmaceutical companies, telling viewers to "ask your doctor about" this medicine or that. Here is a list of just a few of them that I gathered last evening in the short space of three hours:

vraylar
latuda
ozempic
dupixent
solara
ingrezza
prolia
tepezza
entresto
xeljanz
kerasal
nurtec odt
fasenra
opdivo + yervoy
jardiance
rinvoq
sunos
nuplazid

and there are many others I could name if I had the patience to sit and wait for them to appear.

Because they will [appear]. But I don't [have the patience].

I will put what really galls me, sets me off, "gets my goat" about these commercials into the form of a question.

Why do the makers of these drugs -- known affectionately or otherwise as Big Pharma -- market them directly to the great unwashed hordes of viewers (i.e., the patients) instead of to the medical community (i.e., the ones who do the actual prescribing of the aforementioned drugs)? Why?

It makes no sense. I suppose the answer is that this method works for their company's bottom line, or as both Cuba Gooding Jr. and Thomas Cruise Mapother IV said in the 1996 movie Jerry Maguire, "Show me the money". Other lines from that film include "You had me at hello" and "You complete me" but they are not germane to this post.

I would no more dream of asking my doctor about various possible medicinal remedies for what ails me than I would perform surgery. After all, the doctor is the one who went to school for all those years and spent all the money for tuition and deferred any compensation for a decade and gathered all the knowledge that makes it possible for him or her to make the big bucks today. (Again, this is a foreign concept to readers in the U.K., where they have the NHS).

Feel free to agree or disagree in the comments. Your theories are as valid as mine. Probably more so.