AIBU to believe the over ‘concern’ about Mounjaro/Wegovy side effects are disingenuous ?

[Youthinkyourefunny]

All drugs have side effects. However AIBU to think The focus on side effects from Mounjaro/Wegovy is not proportional to real life experience nor do other common drugs cause the amount of anxiety and hand wringing as these miracle treatments.
How many people hesitate to take an NSAIDs like ibuprofen for pain when their side effects are GI bleeding, ulcers, and kidney injury.

Do the millions of people on Statins for high cholesterol hesitate to reduce the risk of stroke or heart disease due to the risk of Muscle injury and liver enzyme elevation ?

What about the millions of women on Birth control pills ? Do you see countless posts asking if it’s safe or sensible to use the most effective way to plan or prevent pregnancy due to the associated blood clot risk ?

Don’t even start reading the patient information leaflet inside the gazillion packs of SSRIs antidepressants prescribed everyday. Or you will be in for a long read but some highlights are internal bleeding, sexual dysfunction, withdrawal symptoms, suicidality risk.

What do all the above have in common? It’s simple. They all treat either physical or mental health conditions that are either painful or life threatening and the known side effects are generally considered ‘worth the risk’ .

So why the over focus on GLP-1s side effects when obesity is equally painful and life threatening ?

I believe it is entirely due to the ingrained acceptability of discrimination against the overweight and obese along with a mind numbing ignorance as to its multiple causes . Which in turn feed the belief that fat always equals stupid. Because all ‘they need to do is eat less and move more’ .. (gosh - I’d never considered trying that 🙄) Therefore these amazing drugs are viewed by a large tranche of society as ‘unfair’ .

Why do the fatties get to be thin when they don’t ‘deserve’ it. ? Throw in a bit of religious indoctrination that gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins, along with a dose of ‘sloth’ because we all know that not only are fat people stupid , they are also bloody lazy. Who have bought it all upon themselves.

Once you ‘get’ how undeserving the obese are you will have a clearer picture as to why I believe there is such disproportionate scaremongering about these drugs side effects. It’s the only way to try and keep fat people ‘in their place’.

YABU No, there is no hidden agenda.
YANBU Yes, there is an over focus disproportionate to risk

But was the uproar about the drugs themselves and informed risk/benefit discussions or were people saying patients were stupid or weak for taking them?

People discuss their concerns about GLP medication in a very different way than they do other medication.

Off the top of my head from reading Mumsnet:

1. It makes makes people taking drugs not want to divulge
2. People who don't take it feel 'cheated' (even if they don't need it)
3. People who find out someone else is taking them feel 'betrayed'.

I've never seen so much discourse regarding a drug, not even the covid vaccines. And even then, there was no vitriol/anger towards the people taking it.

Most of the discourse, the loudest bits in particular, comes from people not even taking it. And when people (like this OP) voice their discomfort, they're told their feelings are wrong.

If I was going to be simplistic about it, it's people perceiving bigger people to be amoral (greedy, lazy tropes etc.). If they stop being fat, people get uncomfortable because how else would they feel superior? Maybe if they CONTROLLED themselves they deserve to be healthy. Not this cheating business.

Fascinating stuff tbh.

Totally agree OP. Although I do feel the tide is starting to turn on acceptance of obesity as an illness.

I am not an alcoholic. I know what to do to not be an alcoholic ie don’t drink too much everyday etc. However if I were an alcoholic and was taking steps to get help/be sober I would generally be applauded as alcoholism is recognised more widely as something people cannot help.

To lose weight is simple you need to eat less. For some people it is literally that simple so they find it very difficult to understand why others cannot just eat less. Why there might be a whole host of physical and mental health factors that make this very very difficult.

You did, about your own medication. It's not even the people taking the GLPs that are doing all the thinking about the side effects.

Apparently everyone is worried about what will happen in the abstract future. It's a policy concern.

Why not smoking? Or vaping? Cocaine? Digital addiction?

I dont remember the whole world discussing SSRIs continuously. I've never seen people try to guess if someone is on SSRIs. Never seen them huddle around in a corner laughing and saying they'll get some SSRI and copy the newly happy lady.

I think many people are fearful of new medicines and not without good reason. There have been awful drug side effects in the past and drug manufacturers are there to be make a profit, in most cases, so I don't see any harm in a bit of healthy skepticism.

That said I think there is a great deal of faux concern around WLI. Being overweight and obese is a really bad for health and WLI are a part of the solution to our increasingly obese global population.

However, there is so much prejudice, disgust & moral judgement towards fat people and a desire to see them as only having themselves to blame for their foul fatness that it seems to stick in the craw of so many that they might actually be able to lose weight and keep it off with WLI.

Of course, it isn't appropriate to say that you hate fatties, hate their fatness and despise them, so it gets dressed up as faux concern over the dangers of WLI. Countless threads on this forum alone are witness to this. When you pick at the very spurious and incorrect opinions dressed up as factual statements, you soon uncover the prejudice behind them.

I love your language choice- "I'm in favour of GLPs". Why do you think the conversation welcomes tour voice? You said you wouldn't be taking them.

If you're looking for a pet advocacy project, why not concern yourself with unknown vaping consequences? Campaign for sexual assault victims. Children in poverty.

I don’t think it’s unique to WLI (ETA - I meant to quote the post about people being unwilling to say they’re using WLIs)

Lots of people are unwilling to say they’re on antidepressants, for example.

Id say antidepressants, HRT for menopause, and WLI (notably all medications taken more/exclusively by women) are judged as being things people should ”just jolly well get a grip of themselves over because we never had this nonsense back in the good old days”.
I think that is changing for antidepressants and HRT, but they’ve been around longer. I know the drugs for WLI have been around for a long time, I’m talking about for this purpose though, as that’s where the judgement is.

As an aside, I don’t take hormonal birth control because of the side effects, and I know plenty of women who are the same. So I’m not sure you’re correct to say that people take these things without a care for the side effects.

Exactly - drugs like varenicline, methadone and naltrexone (for smoking, opiate & alcohol cessation) don't draw this level of worry from totally uninvolved people and all three are comparable to WLI in that they treat conditions that could (in theory) be treated with willpower/ alone.

And all of them are prescribed on the NHS. The vast majority of WLIs in this country are privately funded and so arguably even less of anyone else's business.

The absolute insistence that non medicated weight loss is always better for you than medicated kills me too - even if the poster has said they've done it by cutting out entire food groups, or by restricting their food intake to dangerously low levels. All of that is apparently fine, as long as you don't take a medication...

But why dont people get upset when say cholesterol medications control someone lipids? Why don't they start Mumsnet posts all concerned about SIL who's on statin, working their way through AI generated 'evidence' to prove their point.

So much effort from the people NOT taking the drug. It really is a strange phenomenon.

Dunno but am seriously considering taking them for arthritis. A friend who took them has very positive effects on her arthritis. I don't know if science has concluded whether they are anti-inflammatory as well. I also have autoimmune. Will ask my rheumatologist about them

I think that many threads on MN under this guise are definitely disingenuous. Just a goady dig at overweight people or those with less will power than themselves.

That’s very interesting. I haven’t seen that before.

Weird take on things.

I don’t think the concern is fake. I think we are underconcerned about other meds. Birth control meds cause all sorts of stuff which is why I have never taken them. ADs can also cause all sorts and are strong drugs in many cases. My uncle ran out of them and literally couldn’t get out of bed. Statins cause leg pain to the extent that a relative of mine stopped taking them. WLI has worked for you, that’s great. But plenty of people have legitimate worries about them, as with lots of other drugs. The only drug I take on your list is ibuprofen and I try to mitigate the risk by not taking it on an empty stomach. I don’t think it’s fat hating/shaming. I am fat.

Even if you're correct, then why is it people have chosen to be concerned about his drug and not the others. That's what we're all wondering.

As previously said, the people considering/taking any drug should ABSOLUTELY be informed about the consequences, people who have no requirement for them (either because they don't need or don't want them) have no need to be concerned about this particular drug over and above any other.

I'm fat. I'm not going to take mounjaro because we don't know the risks. There haven't been long-term studies of the effects. I don't want to be a Guinea pig for this one.

'To lose weight is simple you need to eat less. For some people it is literally that simple so they find it very difficult to understand why others cannot just eat less. Why there might be a whole host of physical and mental health factors that make this very very difficult.'

I think this is definitely a factor in the issue people seem to have with weight loss injections. People go by their lived experience so if you've never experienced the struggles or had to contend with 'food noise' etc, then it would seem odd that people who want to lose weight won't just choose to 'eat less, move more'. That's probably where the concern about side effects comes in, why take medication with potentially horrible side effects when you could just follow the simple rules and lose weight? (Obviously ignorant of how much harder it is for some people to actually do this). With all the publicity around wlis now people are being exposed to the factors more and hopefully will begin to understand the causes of obesity more and how it is not a level playing field!

I'm with you OP.

It bugs me that - and maybe I'm wrong - but this is a revolutionary medication for people like you and me who have struggled to lose weight, but instead of giving us some positive stories, it's all "I nearly died from WLI!" type shit, where only the body text reveals that someone who was 8 stone with a BMI of 19 bought pens off some stranger in the pub.

Viagra was developed to help with heart (? I think) problems and other side effects were found. I don't remember any similar scare-mongering about that, I've only seen things like "Great news! If your dick doesn't get hard anymore, we can help with that!".

It's infuriating. It's especially hurtful when people that have never struggled with their weight - and like I always say on these posts, I don't mean gained a stone and then gradually lost a bit bit would like to lose more, I mean sustained weight gain and stagnation and not being able to lose more than a few pounds before gaining it back - feigning concern that you're losing weight with the aid of WLI. It's like, I get judged when I'm fat, judged when I'm trying to lose weight, judged when I wear a sack, judged when I don't....and now judged when I use medication to help me lose weight. Us fatties cannot EVER get approval.

Ok, off my soapbox now.

I can understand why people also feel a little put out when there are many struggling at upper healthy BMI and not qualifying whereas people are allowed to maintain at far lower BMIs.

The excessive “concern” isn’t going to stop until wli are available to anyone who wants them (which I’ve no doubt, given the many non-weight related benefits which are emerging, they will be).

My biggest concern about this drug compared to say, HRT or antidepressants. Is people taking it who don't need to take it. That doesn't tend to happen with other drugs. This could then lead to heath issues for those who really shouldn't be taking it.

Most of the time doctors will weight up the benefits vrs the risks for taking a drug. But as individuals are we really qualified to do that? I don't think taking a medication just to lose 1 or 2 stone is worth it (and yes people are taking it just lose that little). It's totally different if you taking it to lose a lot of weight where you already have significant health risks due to your weight.

This hasn't been the first time diet drugs have been used/come on the market. The only difference this time is that they haven't been pulled because of serious side effects, which where previously unknown. There are also other drugs that have been used to help weight loss, which are still available. But again they have a higher side effect profile then WLI and aren't avaible to buy without a prescription from a GP or specialist.

I only know about this as one drugs I was taking for something non-related to weight loss was also prescribed for weight loss and talked about in the group I was on while taking it. This was before WLI became available, I know its still used as a weight loss drug in the US at lest.

Agree with PPs, the anti-statin stuff is pretty relentless.

I think that WLIs are an absolutely brilliant cure for obesity, and losing 5 stone is a benefit that far outweighs any risks.

But what about if you just want to lose that last stone, or go from a size 12 to a size 8? Are the risks worth it just for that? Maybe not.
I think that that is the usage they are trying to discourage.

Nearly a full house in one post 🤣

@MigGirl, you could say the same about cosmetic surgery and various cosmetic proceedures. They are "needed" even less than WLI and yet I don't see the judgement on here for the people who inject a potentially lethal toxin into their face just to prevent wrinkles!

There definitely is a lot of judgement on here about that!
Not threads started with a title of “AIBU to be ever so concerned about my friend’s health from her fillers”. But any threads around fillers, Botox etc get a lot of judgement.

(I could have included fillers and Botox in my earlier comment upthread about things used mainly by women getting more flack)

I don’t know, I sort of see threads on here in the opposite way.

Someone will post something about the possibility of side effects or long term impact or whatever, and they get 500 responses going ‘oooh jealous much, why do you hate fat people’?

It just shuts the conversation down in a very immature way.