You do have to factor in the (probable) cost of not using Ozempic, aka keeping the pounds on. It may be imprecise, but as an example, if a person was likely to die within 10 years at their current weight, any bad effects beyond the 10 year mark have to be heavily discounted.

At the very least, we should expect to see the same kinds of downsides you’d see for anyone who managed to eat way, way less and lose weight at a multiple-pounds-per-week rate for weeks and weeks on end without taking a drug to do it. They’d be truly miraculous if they achieved their results without even the same cost as doing the same thing without the drug.

On the other hand, being overweight takes years off your life:

"Specifically, we found that BMIs from 40 to 44 were associated with 6.5 years of life lost, but this increased to 8.9 for BMIs from 45 to 49, 9.8 for BMIs from 50 to 54, and 13.7 for BMIs from 55 to 59."

I think for some people the roi is measurable and reasonable.

https://irp.nih.gov/blog/post/2020/01/extreme-obesity-shaves...

> If something sounds good too good to be true, it usually is.

You mean like antibiotics? Or vaccines?

I think this is superstition. Vaccines are a medical intervention that have almost zero downside. There isn’t some mythical cosmic cost-benefit scale that needs to be balanced in every new technology that is deployed.

Vaccines and antibiotics and germ theory are all things that seem “too good to be true” but nevertheless are. Should we be worried that clean fusion power, once commercialized and practical, is going to somehow cause some catastrophic unknown future event just because it yields immeasurable benefit to us?

I think this is just another form of magical thinking.

No one seems to remember Fen Phen or its stratospheric rise and fall https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenfluramine/phentermine