alt Hacker NewsI can understand this perspective. You're looking at it with healthy eyes.
But for fat people, the calculus looks different.
A decision to take semaglutides is a decision between the long-term negative effects of obesity *now*, or the possibility of long-term negative effects *later.*
Anecdotally, trans people have a similar calculus. Going unmedicated/unsupported brings significant mental health risk now[1], whereas going on hormone replacement may or may not cause complications much later in life (osteoperosis, hepotoxicity issues for some treatments, etc).
Either way, you gotta get to the "later in life" part before you can worry about the outlook there.
1: a CDC meta-review said that 26% of surveyed US trans students attempted suicide this year, N=20,103 surveyed, ~660 of which were trans. https://archive.ph/0H81G
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No, they're making a choice between the long-term negative effects of not losing weight naturally, vs the possibility of long-term negative effects of using artificial methods. This isn't polemic, as even things as basic as birth control and advil have negative long term effects.
I was curious and a bit skeptical that sex change operations materially affected suicide rates for trans people but available papers tended to find significant effect sizes of about 50% reduction
Tangential, but
> 1: a CDC meta-review said that 26% of surveyed US trans students attempted suicide this year, N=20,103 surveyed, ~660 of which were trans. https://archive.ph/0H81G
This paper also finds that 5% of cisgender male and 11% of cisgender female students (out of ~8k surveyed for each) attempted suicide in the past year. It's kind of strange, because the age <=18 suicide rate (of "completed" attempts) is much smaller, approximately 1 in 5,000 to 1 in 10,000 [1].
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr024.pdf, Figure 3