I regularly watch the Evening News at 6:30, and that's a show whose audience is clearly 50 and older. I would say that every commercial during the half hour is pharmaceutical. It's rare to find one that isn't. The industry has literally bought that time slot on all the major networks. So the advertising is clearly working.
I think it's because as we get older and sicker, we get more depressed, and the people in the commercials are having more fun than the viewers could ever imagine. Take the meds for a couple of weeks and you'll be dancing, hiking, biking, laughing, and will surely have a more active social life. It may never occur to those watching that these are actors reading a script and not actual patients. They have probably never even taken that medication.
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