[RIMR]

While I can appreciate the principle of not blindly trusting OTC medicine marketing, it is not realistic to expect every person to be highly competent in fully understanding their medical choices. It is far more reasonable to expect the companies marketing healthcare products to be honest to their customers.

If anything, you need honesty from healthcare companies in the first place if you're even going to begin making an informed decision. You're putting the cart before the horse here: people absolutely should be doing their own research before medicating themselves, but it is the OTC companies that obstruct that.

And, secondary to all of this, your analogy about shampoo is misinformed. Still, it is fitting for this scenario, but not in the way you intended. There are lots of different hair types, including ethnic hairstyles that require specific treatments. There are also a number of lifestyle choices that can change your hair treatment needs. As a result, the shampoo aisle actually is stocked with a wildly varying assortment of haircare choices, but actually figuring out what product works best for your needs can be challenging because it is walled behind layers of marketing nonsense that don't inform the consumer adequately on what makes each product different. This isn't much different than the problems in the medicine aisle.

It took a lot of secondhand research to find the ideal hair care product for my thick, curly hair that would mitigate the damage of thrice-weekly swimming in a chlorinated pool. I can assure you, not everything in the shampoo aisle is exactly the same. It was especially hard figuring this out as a man, when so many products are arbitrarily marketed to specific genders.