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Friday Fun Thread for August 8, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What drives such a belief? Do you think that drugs care about the moral pulchritude of those taking them? We discovered semaglutide in the saliva of Gila Monsters, which aren't known to be particularly discerning moral actors.

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.

If someone with high blood pressure takes antihypertensives, their blood pressure falls. If someone with a normal BP takes them, theirs falls too. I would obviously prescribe them to the first case, and not the other two (at least for the control of blood pressure), but the mechanism remains the same.

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.