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.
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.
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.
Promotion and discovery are important. Advertising is the spread of information. Of course some can be bad or misleading, and that is bad.
Well, how do you know that your life couldn't be better with the product? /s