You can vote for president, vote for your city council. But the public (such as suffering patients) don't get to choose who gets the next NIH grant regarding tinnitus, nerve pain, fibromyalgia, ect... A team of biomedical scientist might get the grant, but it will most likely go towards CBT and lyrica ad-nasseum.
Also forgot to add that the sufferers are 70+, and most are clueless buying snakeoil on the internet. Young people with seriously screwed up health problems are going to be acting like this, this is literally a hell for boomers that I happened to end up in.
The reason why no one cares about biomedical research is because all the boomers are getting ready to literally die. No one is going to rush to find cures for these scary health problems because the target audience will be dead in five years. That's why biomedical science is so slow.