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Notes -
The drugs don’t care about morality, and I don’t see it as immoral to want to fit into a wedding dress. But if it comes to light that there are serious side effects, then the FDA is going to tighten the regulations on who can be prescribed the drug because a 19 year old trying to lose 20 pounds to fit in a dress should not be taking drugs that have serious side effects that far outweigh any benefits she gets from losing those 20 lbs. if she ends up with a permanent injury to her digestive tract, or a heart condition or something along those lines, it’s tragic.
Such risks might be worth taking if the person in question is obese enough to have the choice of risking those problems or dying if they don’t lose 200 pounds. We do that all tge time with other problems. My grandmother was on blood pressure medication that was slowly making her blind. The alternative was she has a heart attack. Blindness is bad, obviously, but when compared to a heart attack, not intolerable.
Yes, and having blood pressure go too low is dangerous in its own right. This is why I don’t think it’s going to be prescribed as often as people think. The use case depends on how bad the person’s obesity is, both in absolute weight and in the difficulty of losing tge weight. Depending on the costs it might be much lower than what people are expecting. And as such I think touting ozempic as a miracle cure for obesity is vastly overselling it.
My expectation is that ozempic will mostly be a last resort drug used much like gastric bypass surgery is today — reserved for serious cases of morbid obesity.
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