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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 9, 2023

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Ozempic I wasn't on long enough, or at high enough doses, to see any results, but at the initial dosage I tolerated it well but did not see loss of appetite, etc. happening, and those were the touted effects of "this makes losing weight so easy!"

It would have been better to put you on a higher dose than give up on it altogether, though it's a shame the starting dose didn't work for you.

Trulicity, while in the same class of drug, isn't one that's licensed for the purposes of weight loss, just for the management of diabetes. Which is perfectly fine, but a failure in that regard is unexceptional.

Besides, as a Catholic, I'm sure you're aware that not everyone is so lucky as to encounter a "miracle", but Ozempic works for most people, with minimal side effects, and that's good enough for me, even if it isn't efficacious in literally everyone.

For every person like you who drew the short straw, there's who knows how many who did what no amount of advice to exercise or diet achieved.

Most responsible medical advice would be "you only need to lose ten kilos, stop eating the greasy comfort food and become more active" but if you can manage to wangle it, you may not like the side effects. The major mechanism of action of these drugs is to slow stomach emptying (so you feel fuller for longer, thus don't eat as much and as frequently) and that can be accompanied by everything from flatulence to stomach paralysis.

It doesn't just make your digestion slower, it also makes you less hungry too, in an unrelated manner.

My mom's liver is failing, and no amount of attempts to diet or the tough love people have given her has helped. If she doesn't lose weight, I don't like her odds of making it another decade.

Is life worth living? Depends on the liver.

My case is far more discretionary, and as life has demonstrated, I am capable of losing weight the hard way. I'd still very much rather not, and when it gets cheap enough I'd much rather just take a pill. I, like millions or billions of others, am more than willing to pay for convenience.

But you'll (1) be expected to diet and exercise alongside it, so give up the greasy biryani and (2) be on it for life - stop taking it, the weight piles back on. Most responsible medical advice

Expected? Certainly. Do you need to? Not really. It curbs your hunger my itself, and doctors have been impotently suggesting the above to billions who listen and nod intently and go back to having a cheeseburger. The drug makes the burger unappealing. At that point you're not fighting yourself, you're just doing what you want to, naturally or not.

Cure for gambling/alcoholism/addiction? I'm very dubious, I don't see how this links up with the reported mechanism of action

You should be gratified to hear this came as precisely much a surprise to you as it did to the manufacturers and inventors of the drug.

Doesn't mean it's not true, the human body is fucking weird.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-new-weight-loss-drugs-like-ozempic-treat-addiction1/

The research is very much in the preliminary stages, yet it's promising.

Yet the weight loss, which is by far the most important thing the drug does, is indisputable.

It would have been better to put you on a higher dose than give up on it altogether, though it's a shame the starting dose didn't work for you.

Supply chain issues. The chemist was able to get a month's supply of the starting dosage, but when the doctor was upping me to the higher one no dice - they couldn't get it. So that's when my doctor switched me to Trulicity and the side effects were so bad I said "hell with this, I'm not staying on this one".

The drug makes the burger unappealing.

I read all the wonder stories and was hoping this would happen for me, but nope. Burgers were just as appealing as before. Granted, had I been able to get onto the higher dose for a longer time, who knows? But I think I wouldn't be that lucky. If someone can invent a reliable, guaranteed, "this will kill your appetite" drug that doesn't involve paralysing your intestines or invoking streaming diarrhoea, I'd greatly appreciate that. The only time I haven't been able to eat is when I was so sick, the nurse literally couldn't get a measure of my blood sugar with the 'stick and test strip' meter, and they made me drink sugary energy drink to get the numbers up.

I really, really, really wonder about the addiction results. It'd be grimly funny in that cosmic irony way if it actually does have something to do with the mechanism of addiction, and all the people telling fatties like me "look porker, losing weight is easy: just stop stuffing your face with junk" had to admit that maybe food too is addictive for some people. But probably not, and something weird is going on there.