Earlier quoted context omitted.
My doctor has been prescribing it for obesity for about five years.
Doesn’t work for everyone. I have relatives on it. Still big. The best improvement they made was giving up alcohol.
Giving up alcohol is huge though
Ozempic will disrupt big tobacco, candy companies, and alcohol brands
181–190 of 214 posts
Re: Ozempic will disrupt big tobacco, candy companies, and alcohol brands
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't the worry that Ozempic is only "effective and save" as far as all the other weight loss drugs being utter predatory bullshit ? Last time I looked into it the "loss" is only happening while taking the medication and you get back to normal once you stop, regardless of how long you’ve been taking it. So if stabilizing at a thinner state is your goal, the drug would be mostly useless or you should be ready to take…
Why quotation marks around loss? Why does it feel like recommending meth? Are they similar in addiction and harmful effects?
Because the loss is very limited, and most people regain after stopping medication. As discussed in the other thread, within about a year or so there's already a two thirds rebound, and patients don't see as much health improvement as through exercice for instance.
Re: Ozempic will disrupt big tobacco, candy companies, and alcohol brands
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's always tradeoffs. Ozempic probably has some long term side effects, but are they worse than obesity? Probably not. (And an intervention based on ozempic is far more likely to cause lasting change than one based on a prescribed behavioral program.)
> (And an intervention based on ozempic is far more likely to cause lasting change than one based on a prescribed behavioral program.) I was under the impression that for lasting change the behavioral program was pretty much required anyway, unless the patient wants to take Ozempic for the rest of their life. It helps someone go from obese to the point where they can exercise to maintain their health but they still h…
Yes: for most obese people, to become not obese and stay so for the rest of their life, lifelong Ozempic is the only thing that works at scale. Behavioural interventions more or less don't work (on an individual level they occasionally do, but on a population level they don't).
Re: Ozempic will disrupt big tobacco, candy companies, and alcohol brands
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there is a limited part of the drug market where curing may not be as profitable as maintenance That's the same as asking, > "Is curing patients a sustainable business model?" The offense in question is letting profits effect a decision to develop a treatment over a cure. You're literally spelling out the bad thing.
I think it is good and honest for companies to acknowledge that the current incentives work against trying to achieve [SOME_GOOD_RESULT], as in that case the first step towards getting that thing done would be figuring out how can we change the money flow so that there would actually be motivation for companies to direct their R&D efforts towards that. If the society says to manufacturer "if you do this, you'll get l…
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Re: Ozempic will disrupt big tobacco, candy companies, and alcohol brands
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (And an intervention based on ozempic is far more likely to cause lasting change than one based on a prescribed behavioral program.) I was under the impression that for lasting change the behavioral program was pretty much required anyway, unless the patient wants to take Ozempic for the rest of their life. It helps someone go from obese to the point where they can exercise to maintain their health but they still h…
Yes: for most obese people, to become not obese and stay so for the rest of their life, lifelong Ozempic is the only thing that works at scale. Behavioural interventions more or less don't work (on an individual level they occasionally do, but on a population level they don't).
> for most obese people, to become not obese and stay so for the rest of their life, lifelong Ozempic is the only thing that works at scale.
Ozempic hasn't been around long enough to make that conclusion. It hasn't been prescribed at scale. It hasn't even been around long enough for its patent to expire, which is significantly shorter than a human lifespan ("rest of their life").
You're just making stuff up.
Re: Ozempic will disrupt big tobacco, candy companies, and alcohol brands
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do you see the US government wanting to disrupt these industries, many of which are political donors? When the one being disrupted is a European pharma? Yes.
The article is about disrupting big tobacco, candy companies, etc. being disrupted by a European pharma. Why would the US gov’t make a massive order to bring down costs to disrupt homegrown companies?
> Why would the US gov’t make a massive order to bring down costs to disrupt homegrown companies?
Have you been around our lawmaking institutions, or lawmakers? The idea that we'd sandbag something like Ozempic, which by the way is being negotiated for mass deployment through Medicare [1], to save the likes of Frito-Lay is nuts. Even if we reduce American politics to the lobbyist-conspiracy model, which isn't terribly predictive but whatever, you're pitting big pharma against chips and fast food.
[1] https://qz.com/wegovy-ozempic-weight-loss-drugs-medicare-rul...
Re: Ozempic will disrupt big tobacco, candy companies, and alcohol brands
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
The status quo (obesity) is extremely dangerous, so whatever potential danger you're thinking may exist would have to exceed that.
> extremely dangerous I wish I could just quip a "citation needed", but we're at a point where the visceral hate for fat includes researchers spitting out feel good papers going with the flow, as funding is basically guaranteed. We don't have satanists, so this has become our day's moral panic IMHO: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6885862/
Are you suggesting obesity is not harmful?
Re: Ozempic will disrupt big tobacco, candy companies, and alcohol brands
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn’t work for everyone. I have relatives on it. Still big. The best improvement they made was giving up alcohol.
Giving up alcohol is huge though
Yeah, I just meant that they've done both, Ozempic and Alcohol, it was a noticable change after giving up the alcohol, awesome weight loss, the Ozempic hasn't changed a lot.
Re: Ozempic will disrupt big tobacco, candy companies, and alcohol brands
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
But it still doesn't sound like a sustainable lifetime solution. I think it makes great sense if you're badly out of shape, you fix it, and then you can maintain a healthy weight. But going on ozempic every few years sounds really bad.
> doesn’t sound like a sustainable lifetime solution Would you same the same thing about insulin or statins or even caffeine? Why couldn’t something like Ozempic be something you take long term?
Because it has many bad side effects and it's only treating the symptom, when the real problem is eating too much? Should we keep medicating people for damage that they're continuing to do to themselves willingly?
With regards to caffeine, as a doctor would you prescribe lifetime energy drinks to people who intentionally don't sleep enough?
Insulin is totally different because if you're diabetic and you don't take it, you die. There's no cure for diabetes, so there's no other option but to take it for the rest of your life.
But if you've lost weight (either with ozempic or not), it's possible to not be obese again, you're totally in control of what you put in your mouth. It feels really weird to me to keep medicating people forever when there are well understood ways to manage your weight.
I think it's probably a great solution to help people who have lost control of their weight and need to get back on track. But using it to compensate for an unhealthy lifestyle going forward just seems like bad health policy.
Re: Ozempic will disrupt big tobacco, candy companies, and alcohol brands
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are dangers/risks to buying pharmacy compounded semaglutide -- not really a great thing to recommend widely. It's hard to depend on whatever pharmacy people might be able to find locally or through some hopefully trustworthy portal. That said, with China and more notably India entering the GLP1 RA race, there will be much cheaper options very soon, hopefully!
Relevant supporting FDA article: https://www.fda.gov/drugs/human-drug-compounding/compounding...
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