Why do Americans seems particularly prone to jumping on dubious health solutions?

Maybe I'm wrong, but I get the impression that Americans seem particularly prone, for some reason, to rush to the ease of taking a tablet/medicine as a way to deal with a health/lifestyle issue rather than putting in alternative effort.   Recent example:  Ozempic.  But you get the feeling from Right wing grifting that vitamins and supplements are an especially easy sell in that country too.   (Maybe I'm wrong - it's not as if the supplement market isn't huge in Australia too;  but the political grifty aspect of it in the US seems pretty unique.)  

Is it down to a more laissez faire attitude to capitalism and marketing, such that direct-to-consumer drug marketing is actually common on TV there?   Who knows, but it feels odd.  (It has also always seemed odd to me that Americans were so susceptible to a plague of fentanyl addiction.)

Anyway, these thoughts are brought to mind by this, pretty gobsmacking, article in NPR:

What do you do when you can't get your kids to settle down to go to sleep? For a growing number of parents, the answer is melatonin.

Recent research shows nearly one in five school-age children and adolescents are now using the supplement on a regular basis. Pediatricians say that's cause for alarm.

"It is terrifying to me that this amount of an unregulated product is being utilized," says Dr. Cora Collette Breuner, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington.

Melatonin is a hormone produced by your brain that helps regulate sleep-wake cycles. It's also sold as a dietary supplement and is widely used as a sleep aid. 

Lauren Hartstein, a postdoctoral researcher who studies sleep in early childhood at the University of Colorado, Boulder, says she first got an inkling of melatonin's growing use in children and adolescents while screening families to participate in research.

"All of a sudden last year, we noticed that there was a big uptick in the number of parents who were regularly giving [their kids] melatonin," Hartstein says.

Hartstein and her colleagues wanted to learn more about just how widely melatonin is being used in kids. So they surveyed the parents of nearly 1,000 children between the ages of 1 to 14 across the country. She was surprised by just how many kids are taking the supplement.

"Nearly 6% of preschoolers, [ages] 1 to 4, had taken it, and that number jumped significantly higher to 18% and 19% for school-age children and pre-teens," she says.

As Hartstein and her co-authors recently reported in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, most of the kids that were using melatonin had been on it for a year or longer. And 1 in 4 kids were taking it every single night.

Breuner says that kind of widespread use is deeply troubling for several reasons. She says because melatonin is easy to find on store shelves, people assume it's just as safe as taking a vitamin. But melatonin is a hormone, and she says there's no real data on long-term use in children. She notes there are concerns that it could potentially interfere with puberty and glucose metabolism, among other things, though research is lacking.