It concerns me how discussions, such as this one go on HN. This is an important topic. With the epidemic of obesity we now find a drug that appeals to a large number of people. This is an important topic as well. What is the current comment receiving most of the comment? "That's the sort of headlines that smells like bullshit to me" That's the sort of comment that smells like bullshit to me. What kind of place is thi…
My take it this.
The median scientific paper is wrong. I wrote a wrong paper. The average biomedical paper doesn't fit the standards of the Cochrane Library mostly because N=5 when you need more like N=500 to have a significant result. Since inflationary cosmology fundamental physics has been obsessed with ideas that might not even be wrong.
It's well known that if you lose a lot of weight through diet (and even exercise) you are likely to lose muscle mass. With heavy resistance exercise you might at best reduce your muscle loss if you don't use anabolic steroids and similar drugs. That you could have changes in heart muscle with using these weight loss drugs isn't surprising for me at all and it's the sort of thing that people should be doing research both in the lab and based on the patient experience.
(Funny you can get in trouble if you do too much exercise, spend 20 years training for Marathons and you might get A-Fib because you grew too much heart muscle instead of too little.)
A lot of the cultural problem now is that people are expecting science to play a role similar to religion. When it came to the pandemic I'd say scientists were doing they best they could to understand the situation but they frequently came to conclusions that later got revised because... That's how science works. People would like some emotionally satisfying answer (to them) that makes their enemies shut up. But science doesn't work that way.
The one thing I am sure of is that you'll read something else in 10 years. That is how science works.