Peptides: where to begin?

The issue isn't even just the prescription.

It's that your health care system the doctor is in builds a few extra hurdles. I've talked to my (non-tele) doctor about GLP-1. I've tried losing weight before, with her, there's a long history.

To get approval, between the hospital my doc is in and the insurance, I need to:

1) Have a BMI of >30. Since it's only 29.5, I get to stuff my face if I want to lose weight.

2) Have six sessions with a nutritionist. Which are massively useless, their advice is roughly equivalent to reading Cosmopolitan. I know because I had prior conversations, and they're documented. But still, gotta do it again.

3) Do six months on Weight Watchers. Which is one massive scam leading you right to disordered eating. Also, I've tried for years to lose weight via diet changes, documented and talked through with my doc.

4) Before I can get tirzepatide, I have to get semaglutide for three months to see if it works. Never mind there's study over study over study showing it's slightly less effective and has massively more side effects.

Or I can just cough up the cash directly and buy from Eli Lilly, if somebody signs that receipt.

I'm fortunate enough I could afford that, so I did. (After a second consultation with my family's doctor back home - both they and my doctor agreed it was appropriate, so it's not just a case of "wanting is enough")

And after six months, my weight was in a much better region, lipid panels were much improved, other related biomarkers looked better as well - exactly as numerous studies and my doctors said one could expect.

So, as long as I cough up enough money, sure, I can bypass all the hoops. My health didn't enter the equation, just screw the poors (whose treatment for worse outcomes because they couldn't get access will cost a whole lot more than GLP-1 would've cost).

So, fuck the "prescription hurdle" and the medical system in the US with a hot white glowing iron rod right up the ass.

As for "these are not drugs that anyone can safely take without guidance", that's not really true either.

They're neither hard to take - "inject one vial once a week into the flabby part" isn't rocket science - nor does it cause massive health risks by itself. (And the hazard ratios for diabetes 2 and cardio events are so spectacularly low that they dwarf the other risks)

Yes, talking to a doc is a good idea. No, the current gatekeeping is in no way necessary.

For the vast majority of people “peptides” is a new word and they assume it’s new science that does something new. It’s like if they had never before heard the term “pill” or “injection” and now someone is marketing it to them. So you have a enthusiastic family member going “omg, I got this amazing injection, it can cure cancer, make you look like the rock, cure baldness and fill your bank account all at the same time!” And you go “I doubt that” and they’ll refer you to all the amazing science on injecting things and how injections are used broadly in the health industry and can treat so many different things. And they are not exactly wrong in that connection, they are just dumb, and of cause a given injection being able to treat diabetes says nothing about injections in general and absolutely nothing about cheap foreign snake oil injections.

The same article goes into additional detail:

> Commercial squeezed orange juice is pasteurized and filtered before being evaporated under vacuum and heat. After removal of most of the water, this concentrate, about 65% sugar by weight, is then stored at about 10 °F (−12 °C). Essences, Vitamin C, and oils extracted during the vacuum concentration process may be added back to restore flavor and nutrition.

So essentially there are components that vaporize during processing. The make sure to condense the same components and add them back in so that the orange juice contains all the components of fresh orange juice.

Hat tip. Good point about trans-fatty acids. That was all the rage to label and remove them about ten years ago.

Okay; noting that the argument has moved from "untested" to "relatively untested".

To clarify, is your concern the inadequacy of the approval process FDA uses for (all) vaccines (noting that many vaccines --e.g. influenza-- are refreshed on a fairly regular basis to account for new strains of viruses) or something specific to approval of the MRNA vaccines?

Or is it that MRNA vaccines were a new approach for vaccines more generally, and so there wasn't/isn't the same long-term data that there was/is for multiple generations of vaccines based on older technologies (viral vector, toxoid, etc.)?