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Ask HN: How long until Ozempic/wegovy are no longer in short supply?

• FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  I'm gonna get a lot of hate for this but why would so may people want to deal with Ozempic when you could just put the fork down and move your ass instead, while saving a lot of money in the process? Walking, running, doing pushups is free. Obesity from stuffing your gob with too much food is the most first-world-problem ever. There's people out there with real problems who need care, that aren't self inflicted from their own gluttony.
  • iteria 3y ago
    Why do we need things like alcoholics anonymous. Just stop drinking. It's just that easy! Eating food is not only a necessity to live, but your body is extremely loathe to ever let you reduce how much you're eating. High calorie food might be a person's only comfort. Maybe they're working long hours and caring for someone and taking time off to exercise, something objectively not fun is not something they can emotional commit to. Maybe they're disabled. Maybe they have zero control over their schedule or even their food. Like there are so many reasons you could be overweight and a lot of them are psychological like your parents instilling a deep sense of wrong whenever you leave literally anything on your plate. I don't think these drugs are great long term solutions, but for people who are doing the best they can with what they can, why mock them? It's like mocking someone fat who managed to walk on a trendmill at the gym. It's a start. They can't lose all the weight with just these drugs. They're not miracles. They just give people the ability to see progress for their efforts.
    • tlivolsi 3y ago
      The purpose of AA is to solve the underlying problem of alcoholism, with the goal of eventually quitting it entirely. Taking Ozempic doesn't solve the underlying problem of why someone overeats. It just enables the behavior by allowing the individual to indulge without addressing the eating disorder itself.
      • unmole 3y ago
        > It just enables the behavior What behaviour does Ozempic enable? It works by reducing desire to eat, to the extent that Walmart is trying to figure out the potential impact on junk food sales.
  • Andaith 3y ago
    The purpose of ozempic is primarily to improve your blood sugar situation when you have Diabetes, or something like that. In Australia at least, the TGA does not recommend prescribing ozempic for weight loss(although it's just a recommendation as they can't stop doctors from prescribing whatever they want I guess). It's a bit of an issue because all the people using it for weight loss are causing shortages of the drug for the diabetics who actually need it.
  • qgin 3y ago
    Obesity doubled in the United States since 1975. If a huge state change like that is observed in hundreds of millions of people in a 50 year time period, I guess one explanation could be that they all independently and personally decided to inflict suffering on themselves. Another explanation is something in their collective environment changed. No hate, it's just that to me, that that your explanation is not the most likely one.
  • ilikecakeandpie 3y ago
    There's a few reasons and it's not because it's from "stuffing your gob with too much food" and deciding not to "move your ass" Meat is expensive and fresh and frozen vegetables aren't particularly cheap, leading some households, particularly families and lower income, to pick items like rice, potatoes, noodles etc which are cheap and can go farther. They're calorically dense but not filling so it's easy to consume a ton of calories to feel full from eating rice and butter or butter noodles. There's also the education aspect as one might not know or be able to eyeball what 250g of cooked rice looks like and serving sizes (at least in the US) can be deceptive. Until recently, there wasn't a sticker on 20oz soft drinks that contained the nutrition facts of the whole bottle. Also, while push ups might be free, walking and running isn't. There's a ton of places in the US with sidewalks in poor condition if there's any sidewalk at all. Pedestrian deaths are way up recently as well so walking/running on the road isn't completely safe Sure there will be some that have problems "self inflicted from their own gluttony", but you're making this out like it's the case for everyone using Ozempic while also attributing obesity 1-to-1 with choosing to be overindulgent. You could do with a little more compassion as it's not as simple as you're trying to make it.
  • schwartzworld 3y ago
    > Walking, running, doing pushups is free. Exercise will only get you so far with weight loss, and it only works as long as you can keep up the exercise. In my case I lost 35 lbs running, then broke a foot and gained it back. > Obesity from stuffing your gob with too much food is the most first-world-problem ever. Without addressing that many people are overweight despite constantly dieting, you are absolutely right that it can be a first-world problem. Junk food is cheap, addictive and everywhere. It might be easy for you to eat well, but it's not for everybody. For many, semaglutide blocks the constant food noise, enabling them to make smarter decisions than they are normally capable of. It's obviously a huge problem, because less effective weight loss products have been on the market forever. The reality is that you can tut-tut about how it's better to lose weight the "natural" way, but that's not how it works. Obesity comes with a lot of co-morbidities, and the heavier you are, the harder it is to break the cycle. Even if using weight loss medication was "worse" in some way than rigorous diet and exercise alone, it's not worse than just staying fat forever.
  • toomuchtodo 3y ago
    You cannot outrun poor diet, and willpower is ineffective against biology.
• hello_computer 3y ago
  They'll have plenty after the other shoe drops and the class action suits start rolling in. These things always have a "catch".
  • Zelphyr 3y ago
    There is a lot of truth to OP's statement. There have been many weight loss drugs and supplements--some that were initially game changers only to be pulled off the shelf because they were subsequently found to cause harm and/or death. https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE71063Y/ https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE71063Y/
    • hello_computer 3y ago
      Pharma's models are a joke compared to "the thing itself". It's more like a sitcom formula: p-hack it through trials, scam it through the FDA, harvest the profits, set some aside for the lawsuits. If the liability proves too much, start over. If not, fiddle with the formula just enough to extend the patent, but not enough to require a new round of FDA approvals (see: evergreening). Some legitimate cures may emerge from this process, but only stochastically.
• lulznews 3y ago
  It’s far too valuable. People will start evading the FDA en masse and buy direct from China soon.
• smeej 3y ago
  From what I understand, it's not the drug that's the limitation. You can buy semaglutide from all kinds of peptide vendors "for research use." It's the dosage delivery system that's the bottleneck, and conveniently for anyone who actually wants to try using the stuff and knows how to navigate a syringe, other people can make the drug while Big Pharma tries to get its act together with the injectors.