"Ask your doctor about Klonopin today"
"Ask your doctor about coronary artery bypass grafting today"
One of these sounds completely ridiculous, and the other sounds commonplace. They should both sound ridiculous, because they're both equally completely ridiculous.
The idea that the patient should be influencing the treatment decisions of medical professionals based on things they saw on television is just absurd. It should be illegal. Doctors are all complicit in it, that should be considered medical malpractice, but doctors are put in an impossible position on this stuff and I understand why they do it.
Healthcare in general is just such a goddamn mess. There are so many completely obvious ways to improve it, but it's impossible to implement any of them, and in the meantime people just keep losing their loved ones early to all the inefficiencies and waste and stupidity.
And all the politicians just want to get their stamp on it to show their constituency how caring and benevolent they are, but they're politicians so all they're actually capable of doing is fucking everything up. So they all just keep grandstanding and fucking everything up and it just gets worse and worse every year.