The ‘next Ozempic’ became a social media sensation. Then everything changed
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
Its been really frustrating for me, and has caused me negative health effects.
So while I get, yes, you should lose weight - and this drug does that (and has a whole bunch of other positive health effects), the idea of this going to someone who might only be 30-40 lbs overweight who does not have T2D, infuriates me.
Without it, even on insulin, even fasting, my liver pumps out glucose constantly, I can fast for close to 24 hours before my blood sugar falls off enough to start to be low.
It seems like there are so many billions of dollars in nearly-pure profit to be made, so why is it not a problem that can be solved by throwing money at it?
The delivery mechanism on the pens for Mounjaro are.. highly complex spring loaded devices. On top of that, you have the whole License Raj around pharma manufacturing - we only scaled as fast during COVID with the vaccine because some of the rules were functionally waived.
The delivery mechanism part is less convincing, given that the product is already in the market. I'm not saying that it isn't complex/hard, but it's precisely the kind of thing that throwing money around actually can solve.
Sadly, things are worse in Canada; they won't even give us a timeline on Wegovy availability. I can only imagine what this means for everywhere else in the world.
I've been incredibly frustrated by the lack of support I've received from my slightly fat-shaming MD when it comes to being freaked out by the lack of consistent availability. I've pushed back on starting before supply chain issues are resolved, citing concerns about missing doses being worse than doing nothing at all - even before the cost factor is considered.
It really comes uncomfortably close to the moral failure side of things. "Oh, you won't even try with a reduced dosage? I guess you're not as serious as you said" type BS.
Doctors like this are disgusting. Nothing about obesity is incurable for the vast majority of the obese. It is a lifestyle choice.
Score one more for pharma and drugs that "require" lifetime use.
>If Kay wanted to continue to lose weight, live pain-free, and stave off a dreaded diabetes diagnosis...
Not having anyone close with diabetes, so I'm quite unfamiliar with that landscape: why is being diagnosed with type-2 "dreaded"? If it's a valid diagnosis, and it would solve many of your problems, it feels like a fairly obvious choice...
I'm sure there are social stigmas around it, but is that all? Or are there some severe insurance implications or something?
Or is it more that they're worried about developing "full" type-2 in a few years if nothing else changes? But if that's the case, trying to get diagnosed with it ASAP seems like a reasonable route, not dreading it.
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Edit: correction, ignore the below. Rogers here is a diagnosed diabetic who had to stop using it due to shortages.
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>Due to shortages, Rogers had to stop taking Mounjaro for three weeks. “I was a wreck over it and full of despair,” said the 58-year-old. “I gained several pounds back, but I was surprised at how badly I felt when my [blood glucose] numbers got out of control again. It was a wakeup call to me to realize how sick diabetes makes you.”
Tbh that sounds like resisting diagnosis, not worrying about a future health decline.
These shortages mostly happened because of a patent monopoly.
It wouldn’t surprise me if in a couple decades some non-trivial percentage of the folks using it for longevity end up with PSP, which is a fatal and untraceable disease.
If we’re not going to nationalize drug manufacturers, they should at least be regulated (competently, as to avoid regulatory capture), but I have little faith in the government to be able to do so effectively.
You mean the current regulations that fine drug makers for promoting off label use, of which handing out coupons arguably constitutes?
Scale back proportionately from there.
In these recent cases it’s the non-regulation of celebrity posts on social media and rent-a-docs causing shortages of medicines intended for diabetes.
It is really the worst of America, either pay fortune for medication, or nationalize healthcare (with socialism...). There is no middle ground.
I can't imagine someone saying "the gravity theory of plane crashes is exploded" even though when we look at how to prevent plane crashes we look at other causes.
when you say this, you reveal your ignorance of the biology that makes it far more challenging for some people to "eat less" than others, and that changes their metabolism to combat the weight loss if they do happen to "eat less" for some time.
Yes, calorie imbalance is a thing, but you can be a 300 lb person who eats 2750 calories a day, also be a 200 lb person who eats 2750 calories a day, with each performing a similar amount of exercise.
While calories in/calories out will help anyone lose weight, for some, even with the advantage of math - its still much harder, sometimes an order of magnitude harder.
I've done this before, and I lose around 100 lbs, and I've kept off about 60 of it - but for the entire two years, I had a gnawing, burning pit of hunger whenever I was away. It never stops, and I never stopped being hungry. I just did my best to ignore it.
On top of that, look how many social occasions revolve around food, to stick to any essentially effective diet requires refraining in those situations. That's even harder. "oh, everyone is going for fast food after the thing, I guess I can just have some water? okay, I guess that's okay" because one fast food meal exceeds your calorie goal for the entire day.
Now you tell me, how easy is it to eat less if you never felt satiated, never stopped being hungry?
My point here, is while calorie counting and exercise works, there is clearly more going on than just that.
To me it seems to be a majorityu of cultural & calorie intake thing rather than a medical issue. Not to say it's easy (it's not) and not to say there aren't people with medical issues.
Us having enough calories available and the kinds of work around where people can lead a defacto life of leisure (by comparison to every other period of time).
Any time humans have an extended lack of scarcity the natural biological programming that makes someone fatter, takes over.
Also, love your username ^^
So yes, humans are a thermodynamic system, but that isn't a model that explains the dynamics of what your body does with it's tissues. It's more complex than that.
It's kind of like saying, "a CPU is just a resistive heater." There's a way in which this is true and it's a useful perspective for designing a cooling system. But it's a useless model to give to someone asking for advice in debugging race conditions, because you've erased the complexity their problems arise from.
Additionally there's a moralizing component where people erase this complexity in order to blame people for their medical problems and frame it as an issue of irresponsibility.
No one has ever said, "aircraft crashes are caused by gravity, and the moral failing of pilots not to understand this most basic principle. Imagine spending so much money on flight school when all you need to do is watch stuff fall, that's all you need to know." There is no gravity theory of airplane accidents in the same way there is a caloric imbalance theory of obesity.
Consider also that airplanes are "simple"[1], well understood, engineered systems which are centrally coordinated, and that bodies are complex, evolved systems, containing autonomous components, many of which are very poorly understood. Aircraft are engineered for consistency, with faulty or expired components swapped out, whereas humans vary dramatically, not only between each other, but over the course of their lives. Other people have very different bodies & experiences than you do; it can be night and day.
I came to understand this when speaking to a friend with executive dysfunction. I kept telling them they were beating themselves up or undermining themselves when they told me about limitations they experienced. Eventually they snapped at me and described their day to day in detail, and I realized their mind as a different place with different demons than mine, and that there were things I could do easily that they struggled with, and things I struggled with that were an ordeal for them. (They're a very smart and capable person who has abilities I do not, and of course I have demons and struggles they do not have as well.) I meant well but what I was doing was really undercutting and devaluing their lived experience, trying to comfort and bolster instead of understand.
[1] In the sense that they are not "complex systems" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system (obviously aircraft are complex in a general sense)
"just eat less"
it's that easy. the people who don't do it are just stupid or lazy (in the mind of the fat haters)
Yes. Just do it.
You had a lot of extra fun stuffing yourself with food, you will have to pay the price for that at some point(either with hunger or with health problems if you don't lose the weight)
It's very simple to lose weight, it really is, just don't eat. The problem is that it's not fun(hunger is not fun, obviously).
But the bill comes for the extra fun you had with food, it's either hunger or serious health issues.
I hope you'll reconsider but if that's how you're going to behave there's no productive conversation to be had.
It is never an obese person's fault for stuffing themselves, it's always something else. In this thread it's the big bad pharma corps that don't give away for free diabetes drugs to people that don't have diabetes.
I wish you all the best, when you realize the problem is your lack of willpower maybe you'll lose weight and not gain it back.
1) Diet: Low carbohydrate diets are one technique: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9437985/
"In this randomized, crossover intervention trial among adults with prediabetes or T2DM, the 12-week percentage change in HbA1c, the primary study outcome, improved significantly for participants on both diets"
2) Exercise: High intensity training and strength training improve blood measurements. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30270019/
"From a practical clinical perspective, the performance of [strength training] + [high intensity interval training] may be advised for additional benefits regarding insulin dosage reduction."
In short, cut out the bread, deserts, pizza , lift some weights and do some sprints. Keep doing it.
Pubmed is great resource. Search for terms like "clinical trial" "diabetes", "HIIT", "mediterranean diet", VFKD. [edit: I do want to emphasize the term "clinical trail". Diet and nutrition research has a lot of other types of research. Often the quality suffers. Clinical trials, and hopefully other clinical trials that verify earlier findings, are the best.]
Getting on top of the situation early will save you a lot of grief ( and doctor's visits and paying for drugs).
I disagree with "never". I think most people can use diet and exercise to avoid and even reverse type 2 diabetes. An unpopular opinion hereabouts, but likely true.
The diet part is also possible in theory, but many people's family and social environments practically require them to eat muffins, cakes, sweet desserts, and other micronutrient-poor dishes. Refusal to take part gets them ostracized.
Most people will let you slide on gorging if you simply say "Doctor's orders". HIIT means sprinting hard 3 times twice a week. Just about anybody can do it.