A heavily-accented, digitally-animated bee speaks matter-of-factly about Nasonex (SGP). The roll call of symptoms the drug has been proven to prevent so perfectly mirrors your own long-suffering history, you forget you’re getting healthcare advice from, well, a heavily-accented, digitally-animated bee.

If it isn’t seasonal allergies that ail you, maybe it's insomnia. Curiously, once-prevalent spots for sleeping pill Lunesta (SEPR) are mostly absent from TV these days, replaced, it seems, by a glut of commercials for FreeCreditReport.com. (This would seem to suggest that, in some counterintuitive way, a faltering economy is the greatest inducer of sleep there is.)

Or perhaps you’re a middle-aged guy with salt-and-pepper hair and an enviable jaw line, who likes to set lyrics about his erectile dysfunction to old Elvis Presley songs.

Whether you’re in the market for Viagra (PFE) or just something to help you sleep, it’s never as simple as just consulting your doctor (as the aforementioned commercials uniformly instruct you to do). No, for sweet relief, you’ll have to present that illegible prescription to a pharmacist.

And thank goodness. Given our culture’s near-obsession with medicating away everything from age-appropriate lack of focus to common fatigue, it’s reassuring to know somebody’s functioning as a gatekeeper. Sort of.