Public Health?...If It's So Important, Why Are there Not More Advertisements?...?

Question

Promoting Better Health Care instead of prescription drugs. For example: Lunestra--helps you sleep through the night? Commercial asks if you can't stay asleep; if you toss and turn and can't go back to sleep?
Why aren't there any Public Health Ads educating people to exercise more, eat better to sleep better or be more fit? Especially since obesity is now a national epidemic, for example.
FDA could do ads. Why don't they?

Answer 1

Yes you are right my friend.They must.

Answer 2

The simple answer is: WE CAN'T AFFORD IT.

Public health budgets are spent on things as wide and far flung as clinic operations, disaster preparation, health inspections, disease control campaigns, disease surveillance .. oh, and staff wages! And trust me, the wages are modest at best for most of us in public health.

Public health is funded with tax dollars. We simply don't have the kind of budgets that pharmaceutical companies have. We can't spend a lot of our money of advertising. We do what we can with our health education budgets (pamphlets, fliers, and lectures).

I'd **LOVE** to devote more funds to educational campaigns. But to do that, either media outlets (TV, radio, internet, billboards) need to cut us some serious price breaks to run PSA's. Or taxpayers need to be willing to pay more money in taxes to support public health funding.