Smoking causes lung cancer. I don't smoke, but if they found a cure for lung cancer I would celebrate that rather than griping about "personal responsibility" or whatever it is your grievance here is.
This thing objectively and subjectively improves the lives of the people you share this world with. If you have a problem with that it might be time to turn your gaze inward.
I'm upset that we just accept a society that requires a lifelong commitment to purchasing a drug as an appropriate answer, rather than looking at real causes of why people are so unhealthy. I don't think it's exclusively a matter of personal responsibility, rather a supply chain and incentive structure to produce sick people that need medication to be healthy. This is a band aid.
> rather than looking at real causes of why people are so unhealthy
I'll answer this one.
The human body is designed and built to eat as much as possible, as often as possible. The brain will prod, poke, and even force you to eat.
For all of human history and prehistory, this is incredibly advantageous. A greedy approach to food consumption allows lower risk of starvation, and fat reserves can be utilized to provide survival mechanisms when food is short.
For the first time in human history and prehistory, we have an abundance of food.
Some humans, a minority, are able to simply fight their biological urges or they may not even have those urges. If this were 10,000 years ago, they would surely be one of the first to die. Now, however, this is advantageous.
Every single part of our biology is in contradiction with modern society. It's not a shock that humans have a problem with obesity. If I gave my dog infinite kibble, I give him a month before he has killed himself.
I don’t buy this fatalistic attitude at all. Japan has an abundance of food as well, and Japanese humans are also human. Yet I don’t see nearly the same level of obesity here. The difference is entirely cultural, and yet you argue that we poor humans are destined to overeat. It’s not like the poor Japanese are suffering not to overeat every day of their tragic lives.
Instead the same measures that work here work in western countries as well. Free food at schools in the US and Europe has led to less obesity. Teaching cooking at school has led to less obesity. Teaching appreciation of the own physical self as a gift that one is responsible for rather than a burden has led to less obesity.
None of this requires throwing even more money at pharma to balance out the out-of-control American food industry (originating from the unscrupulous tobacco industry) which pays pharma to create more addictive foods. And yes, our bodies did not evolve to handle those ultra-processed foods laden with additives, but that is not normal food! Look up how the American food industry wreaked havoc in Latin America, leading to insane rates of obesity in mere years.
I don't think that anything you said here is wrong, however I don't see how any of it is relevant either.
I mean, sure... We should fix all the everything, but we can also help the people who are dying right now while we do that. They aren't mutually exclusive.
Imagine rejecting a cure for cancer because it might encourage smokers to continue. That would just be silly.
Yes, and like a band-aid it will help sick people heal. Which is a good thing, that should be celebrated.
I don't believe that I've ever heard anyone espouse the idea that nothing else in the patients life should change, or that the drugs alone are a complete answer. Although, that seems to be the counter position to your argument.
Everyone knows that fat people need to eat less and exercise more, including the fat people. These drugs help them do that. The drugs are advertised, sold, and prescribed that way and include advice to that effect in the informational pamphlets they come with in addition to usually including a lecture from your physician.
What else do you need before you can just be happy for people that are struggling a little less now?
I'm happy for that, I repeated that I don't blame the people that get it prescribed. And I was using the term band aid in the colloquial term, as in 'something that doesn't address the root issues'.
Obesity, diabetes, have all risen, especially in kids since the 90s, what changed, and what caused this? Are we still having the same causes, or because we can get a lifetime prescription to Ozempic and cover up the worse symptoms, we're ok with it? This is a massive red flag that something is wrong with this situation, not because some people are losing weight, but because some people are getting people sick and others are selling a cure at their expense. Encouraging another lifelong prescription is not addressing the causes and encouraging people to benefit off of making people sick.
I can accept that there may be larger root causes left to address, as long as we can also be clear that these drugs are also a huge win for individual health while society works on those, possibly intractable, root causes.
It's obviously going to be faster to treat individuals than it is to change our entire societies relationship with food and how we produce it, and we shouldn't just let all the fat people die while we figure it out.
This thing objectively and subjectively improves the lives of the people you share this world with. If you have a problem with that it might be time to turn your gaze inward.