There can be no "honest" advertising of drugs. We need to start banning ads for drugs completely. It probably wouldn't hurt to do the same for alcohol, etc. It's not like people still won't drink or asking for drug X but it stops the patients from demanding it. We've already made some strides by banning the pharma reps from sending super models to doctor's office to flirt and convince them to push drug X but we need to push further.

Instead we should be spending more money at the FDA level. The surgeon general should have the resources that say that condition X, the approved drugs are A, B, C, D and E. You can also do in a phased fashion. You always prescribe A. Only if that fails do you prescribe B, etc. There are lots of treatment plans like this already (usually driven by insurance costs) but these could be built by leading physicians in each specialty. There are providers that have the knowledge of what works and doesn't but we do an awful job of capturing it. Most doctors just know what they learned in school 30 years ago or what they can google. We need better codification of successful treatment options for each condition X.