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

Fair enough. I hadn't noticed it so much and I definitely see less of it in mainstream media, but it may just be because it has been around for longer and is therefore less likely to generate clicks.

Of course people think about the side effects before taking statins, blood pressures tablets, ibuprofen etc eg I don't take ibuprofen because the risk of it upserting my stomach is greater than the benefit I will get from it's pain killing effect and I don't take statins even though I was offered them because my risk of getting a stroke is still lower than the risk of possible side effects If my risk of having a stroke increases I will take the statins.
I don't see any problem with the side effects of weight loss medication being researched and made public. Especially as those drugs were not developed as weight loss medication originally. Then people can consider their own situation and their individual risk/benefits .
It would be immoral if researchers didn't publicise the possible side effects of taking weight loss medication. That doesn't mean that for some people the risk of not taking it isn't greater than the possible risk of taking it but for other people that won't be the case.

Of course no one should be taking medication they don’t need - I totally agree with that. Ultimately though, prescribing is between a patient and their doctor, who weigh up individual risks and benefits, including for weight loss medications, just like any other treatment.

There will always be cases of misuse or people obtaining things inappropriately but that’s true of many prescription drugs (painkillers being the most common example) & it doesn’t really say anything about appropriate medical use. It also doesn’t justify criticism of people who are legitimately prescribed them, which is often what happens in discussions like this.

It's the same about ADHD medication and to some extent antidepressants, although I think antidepressants are slowly losing stigma.

I think there is probably a sort of instinctive suspicion about medications which seem to affect the brain rather than, for example, blood pressure medication, although to me the way both things work is equally mysterious. And I don't think there are many people who would protest or worry about the use of e.g. antipsychotics in the case of schizophrenia, or medication for severe OCD. It's only really for conditions (depression, anxiety, ADHD, difficulty managing appetite) which seem relatively "normal" or related to feelings a majority of people have to some extent, where the questioning seems to come in.

It's also tied up in faux moral concern where the moral seems to be that having difficulty regulating appetite is a personal failure.

TBH though the more I learn about ADHD and to a lesser extent (only because it's not my experience whereas ADHD is) the kinds of difficulty people benefiting from WLI have, it makes me think that our general narratives and understanding about effort, willpower and behaviour in general are completely skewed and based on a false premise. I wouldn't go so far as to say I don't believe in free will, because I do believe we have control and choice over our actions. But I don't think that control and choice play as big a part as we generally believe. I think there are a lot of layers which underlie human behaviour and we cannot ascribe all of it to moral choice. Maybe 20%? I think 80% is under the surface and we are not really aware of this. We are animals to some extent acting on instinct. Our brains rationalise a lot of our actions after the fact (this is something proven by research). I actually think the most control we have over our behaviour is when we anticipate in advance and plan for what we will do. What we choose in the moment is mainly based on rehearsed data (what we've done in the past and what the immediate outcome was from that) or instinct, which points us towards behaviour which promotes survival, such as taking on calories, conserving energy by resting when it is safe to do so, following sexual urges, escaping/avoiding things our autonomic nervous system perceives as dangerous, and seeking social approval (or perhaps avoiding social disapproval) by noticing and following the behaviour of others - and much of this is unconscious.

It's a weird one for sure. And definitely hyped up by media, most likely because it is divisive. I won't say it's totally algorithm-driven, because "concern" about antidepressants has been a staple of newspapers for several decades now, but there is definitely something in the way that news media and social media are using algorithms which select for engagement and attention, but what actually happens is that humans engage with and pay attention to content which promotes strong feelings (anger/upset of being persecuted/not heard, anger about perceived unfairness or someone getting an unfair advantage, fear relating to unknown dangers, anxiety in general) and the topics which promote the strongest feelings tend to be the ones where we feel tribal or protective, where there is a clear "us vs them" feeling. So for WLIs it will be people who use them/see a benefit from them vs people who are angry/jealous/being misled to be worried about them and want to ban them, or from the other perspective, people who have concerns and want them to be looked at vs the drug companies benefiting financially from the "naive" users who need to be saved. Because algorithms work so well to divide what content you see, the two groups both believe they are morally right and the opposing group are either evil, stupid, selfish, or vulnerable. And it's not just computer algorithms blindly dividing this stuff up either, there are bot farms and content farms with humans specifically looking out for topics which create this divide and feeding more content into the world which will exacerbate the debate on both sides, like they see a crack and drive a wedge into it. (I know this sounds like a conspiracy but these places genuinely exist.) And we know that people who see a lot of the same content will then go and perpetuate the same ideas in the genuine belief that they are true, so there are multiple layers to all of it. The amount of algorithmically-sorted content we tend to consume has acted as a catalyst for all of it, so if you can reduce the amount of this you use then it helps a lot, and understanding how the divides are created can help you look for more nuanced areas of grey and real experiences in the middle which don't lend to extremes on either side.

Don't you? I've seen quite a bit of it.

I tell everyone who comments on my weight loss too. I don’t believe for one second the fake.. I’m just being judgmental because I’m worried about the side effects comments I’ve had of a few people.. They just don’t want to admit they are jealous. I was also jealous by the few people I knew that had lost weight on Mounjaro, because I couldn’t afford it and didn’t qualify for it on the NHS (I had a small compensation payout that meant I could afford to give it a go)
The difference is I can admit that my jealousy is my problem. I would bet money that the majority that hold these strong anti weight loss jab opinions would be on them themselves in a heartbeat if the price dropped to £20 instead of £200.