Now, after a doctor’s involvement, my friend is on the new med and it treats their condition better and the quality of their life is improved.
The ad triggered a series of events that helped my friend.
The doctor, for whatever reason, was not the primary motivation.
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.
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.
The distinction, to me, is obvious.
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.
The role of search
If so, I'm not so sure it is advertising, as being discussed here, that you're referring to.
If not, funny coincidence.
I am partly named after the doctor in the song Comfortably Numb.
I'm sorry, a single anecdote does not invalidate the above.
Ads are evil. They make us desire things we don't need, undermine our self-esteem, and in the large part just sell scams. I'd be happy to ban most forms of advertising. It's a plague.