alt Hacker NewsWe know obesity is one of the absolute worst things you can do to yourself as a human.
We know that being prescribed diet and exercise has not helped hundreds of millions of people in the world stop being obese.
We do not catch every long term concern when developing a medicine - but we do catch a decent amount! We know specific mechanisms to be concerned for, e.g. angiogenesis and the likelihood of accelerating tumor growth, lots of others. We do not see any mechanisms that would point towards health risks anywhere near the level of obesity.
So the realm of concern lies around possible long term side effects that we're not aware of.
If you find yourself in a room that is on fire, and you see a door but you're not sure what's on the other side of it, are you going to refuse to open it because there might be something worse on the other side?
"Too good to be true" is also just an aphorism, not a law of nature. It's certainly possible that are negative long term impacts from GLP1 medications, but should all of the people that have been unable to remove one of the single biggest health risk factors in human history via diet or exercise not pursue an option that we know is highly effective at removing that risk factor just because there might maybe be something worse years down the line? We're not talking about acne or hair loss here, man.
> If you find yourself in a room that is on fire,
The immediacy of the danger makes things incomparable.
> "Too good to be true" is also just an aphorism, not a law of nature.
It's not "too good to be true". It's "no free lunch" (unfortunate pun), or "conservation of energy": the more one wins without apparent loss, the more one should be suspicious.
There are furthermore great reasons to be highly skeptical of pharmaceutical compagnies: consider the ongoing opioid crisis in the US, in great part caused by the sale of opioid-based medication (OxyContin) whose addictiveness was purposefully downplayed. Not to say that things will be as scandalous, merely that pharmaceutical compagnies cannot be trusted.
> We're not talking about acne or hair loss here,
Yes, and the people suffering from eating disorders are often psychologically weakened as a result (and/or cause), thus vulnerable to further abuse. Of course such people want to hear about a miracle way to solve this pesky, long-standing issue, of course.
And that's exactly what they're being sold; it's disheartening.