Diet Drugs Work: Why Won't Doctors Prescribe Them?

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Suzanne Koven, a primary-care doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, writes in the New Yorker that the FDA has currently approved four drugs that will help patients lose weight but few primary-care physicians will prescribe them. Qsymia and Belviq work by suppressing appetite and by increasing metabolism, and by other mechanisms that are not yet fully understood. 'But I've never prescribed diet drugs, and few doctors in my primary-care practice have, either,' writes Koven and the problem is that, while specialists who study obesity view it as a chronic but treatable disease, primary-care physicians are not fully convinced that they should be treating obesity at all. The inauspicious history of diet drugs no doubt contributes to doctors' reluctance to prescribe them. In the nineteen-forties, when doctors began prescribing amphetamines for weight loss, rates of addiction soared. But in addition, George Bray thinks that socioeconomic factors play into physicians' lack of enthusiasm for treating obesity because obesity is, disproportionately, a disease of poverty. Because of this association, many erroneously see obesity as more of a social condition than a medical one, a condition that simply requires people to try harder. Louis Aronne likens the current attitude toward obesity to the prevailing attitude toward mental illness years ago and remembers, during his medical training, seeing psychotic patients warehoused and sedated, treated as less than human. 'What the hell was I thinking when I didn't do anything to help them? How wrong could I have been?' Specialists are now developing programs to aid primary-care physicians in treating obesity more aggressively and effectively but first primary-care physicians will have to want to treat it. 'Whether you call it a disease or not is not so germane,' says Lee M. Kaplan. 'The root problem is that whatever you call it, nobody's taking it seriously enough.'"

Comments

No, they don't work

[Anonymous Coward]

Your diet is a perpetual thing, not something you do for a little while to lose weight. Eat healthy, be healthy. Drugs and short term adjustments in what you eat aren't going to do shit.

Re:No, they don't work

[Anonymous Coward]

This. There is absolutely no point taking medication (FFS) to control your bad habits. As soon as you stop taking them, you'll revert back. It's not difficult. Eat less, move more. The only caveat being there is some some recent evidence that some people do genuinely have more trouble with this than others but it doesn't make the advice any different. Grow a pair, stop blaming other people for your own bad eating habits, take control of your life and stop being conned by all the faddy diets aimed at quick fixes. There are no quick fixes, just good, healthy ways to eat.

For many people, this is the solution. However, with a bit of hyperbole, your same advice would be true with drug addicts, but not work. You going to tell a heroine addict that they should just quit? Now, for eating too much, it's not nearly so bad, but there are some edge cases where I'm not sure that it's so clear cut. Sometimes the holes that we dig for ourselves are too deep to get out of.

Re:No, they don't work

[DarkOx]

Diet and exercise is fine advice for someone like me, who the doctor has suggested could stand to lose 15 pounds. I can accomplish that without drugs, and by doing it now, I'll likely improve my eating habits and not find myself needing to take off even larger amounts of weight later. But my eating habits are already pretty good compared to many, and I get lots of exercise ( I love walking and do walk anywhere I can get on foot safely ). I just need to arrest my sweet tooth a little.

Once people become obese though getting enough exercise to burn any serious calories can be very difficult. They can't walk to the store to do their shopping or spend 20min on the elliptical at home because they'd be exhausted after five. Yet they have all these fat cells their body now thinks it needs to maintain screaming eat constantly. Not impossible to conquer with will power alone perhaps but probably really freaking hard; at to the fact that because they can't get exercise easily their metabolism is probably lower than it should be and they can't burn the extra calories by working out so its going to take a seriously long time before they see any improvement. There is nothing more psychologically challenging then lots of hard work, and discomfort without any short term payoffs.

Yea I agree they did it to themselves and when it comes to who should have to pay more for a plane ticket, medical insurance, and similar where obesity decidedly raises costs, yea I think they should be expected to pay. They should have recognized a problem early and done something about it when it was possible, if they became obese as children their parents should have intervened.

But they are where they are now and if a drug can help them better themselves, why would you want to deny them? Once they get healthy they are going to need to learn good habits to stay healthy but that will be much easier for them if they could get healthy first.

Re:No, they don't work

[Assmasher]

It's not difficult. Eat less, move more.

Perhaps you meant to say "It's not complicated." It is quite obviously difficult for many people.

Re: No, they don't work

[O('_')O_Bush]

It is really easy to chalk up reasons why are you not overweight to for whatever superiority complex you have about it. You see similar things with the ultra rich that were born with their parents money ("all those plebians should just work harder and become wealthy like me").

The reality is that unless you've been 50-100 pounds overweight all your life and worked your way down to a healthy weight for at least 5 years, your opinion about what makes people fat is worth less than dog shit.

Re:No, they don't work

[Anonymous Coward]

This. There is absolutely no point taking medication (FFS) to control your bad habits.

Except for many, weight gain is not about bad habits. As much as the internet likes to have this "energy in needs to be less than energy out" story repeated at all corners, there's tons of reasons why it's not actually that simple. It's been found that overweight people commonly have a large variety of reasons why it doesn't work like that:

• Metabolic rate –which affects how much of that energy in is transferred into the body.
• Bacterial fauna –which affects how much of that energy is consumed by other organisms (and alone has been demonstrated to make the difference between morbid obesity and underweight)
• Genetic factors that affect whether your body decides to store the fat, or reject it
• Genetic factors that affect whether your body decides to burn predominantly fat or sugars (and hence affects how much is stored/rejected)

There's probably more, and this ignores a whole swathe of psychological reasons why overeating might occur without direct will, or in a similar way to addiction. This is simply some of the list of reasons why you might be fat, by eating the same amount as a skinny person, and exercising the same amount as them.

As soon as you stop taking them, you'll revert back. It's not difficult. Eat less, move more.

Actually, that's not necessarily true. Commonly one of the reasons for high energy intake in fat people is that they are not processing sugar efficiently any more. This actively contributes to their body telling them they are hungry earlier, and that they want more sugary foods. By getting them down to a healthy weight, and keeping them there for a reasonable time, these diet pills may actually have a sufficient impact on the addiction that it breaks the cycle. That, and of course by reducing appetite they may well help control the brain's assumption of what a healthy meal size is.

Grow a pair, stop blaming other people for your own bad eating habits, take control of your life and stop being conned by all the faddy diets aimed at quick fixes. There are no quick fixes, just good, healthy ways to eat.

Well done, you are demonstrating exactly the belief that it's a social condition, not a medical one talked about in TFA.

Re:No, they don't work

[bmo]

> which for 98% of the population is solved with willpower and determination alone

Spoken like someone who's never had to deal with weight issues.

You're a complete asshole. No, really.

>food isn't a addictive as heroin

It's worse, actually. You don't need heroin to live. You need food to live. It's always around. There is no putting it away. There is no removing yourself from the environment that triggers it.

And that's what you don't effin' get.

This calvinist shit really has gotten old.

But hey, you keep going with your preconceived notions about how things "should" work instead of how they do.

--
BMO

before anybody pops pills

[stenvar]

Ask yourself the following:

(1) Are you cooking most of what you eat yourself?

(2) Have you cut all sugar, pasta, bread, and other starchy foods, and most saturated fat and meat from your diet?

(3) Have you been tracking your calories and weight daily for the past month?

If the answer to any of these questions is "no", you haven't seriously tried losing weight, and nothing is likely to help you.

A fine example of the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The previous post is a fine example of the problem: treating obesity as a moral failing. If you were a "good person" you'd have the willpower, eat right, etc.

Sure, modern lifestyles and diets are a contributor to the problem, but not the entire cause. There is ample peer-reviewed validated research out there that shows that some people are more efficient at metabolizing food, and that you can exercise as much as you like and eat as little, and still not lose weight as much (and suffer a variety of undesirable side effects in the process).

Bear in mind also that the underlying biochemistry of the "average adult" has changed as the result of food and activities during childhood. A travesty to be sure (juvenile onset diabetes, for instance), but now that you have that 20 year old with the screwed up biochemistry (in terms of comparison to 1900s man), you're not going to fix it by changing diet and activity.

And then, there's the practicality problem. If your job, which pays for the food you eat, requires you to sit in a cube with a headset on and a keyboard, no amount of Outside magazine inspired "get out and get fit" exhortation is going to provide an opportunity to "live a healthy lifestyle". Companies talk the talk, but when it comes to adversely affecting productivity, they do not walk the walk: that's why company wellness programs emphasize things like smoking cessation.. it's something you can do on your own time that saves the company money (yes, it's a good thing, but the real point is that the employee is doing the heavy lifting).

And so, after sitting in the cube all day, or inspecting people at a checkpoint, or whatever task there is, you ride the bus to your second job, so you can make the rent on your apartment in the food desert. Not a whole lot of time to prepare that nutritious meal from non-existent ingredients.

So, before exhorting "good healthy ways to eat", let's talk about paying people enough so they can afford to do so (in terms of time available, etc.)

Good health in a pill? Sure, why not?

[PeterM from Berkeley]

Hello,

    I'm a weight loss and weight long term control success story, more or less. But having done it, I know exactly how hard it is.

    I'd love it if the US population could dump their extra pounds by taking a pill. It'd just be a win for everyone, and the only people who'd "lose" are those who feel superior because they've managed to do it without the pill.

    And even THOSE people will be paying lower health insurance premiums because the population is healthier in general.

    If the pills really work, BRING 'EM ON! Who knows, if I can't exercise some day (I'm currently taking a few weeks off because I got rear-ended in my car!), then I'll need them myself!

--PeterM

Re:Good health in a pill? Sure, why not?

[swb]

What's so funny about this (and reinforced by the other replies to your post) is that people really object to the morality of other people "getting away with something" -- eating too much of the wrong food and not exercising enough.

I'm surprised they don't object to people with infections being treated with antibiotics, since if they had better hygiene they wouldn't get sick.

Why should you care if someone else is healthier by taking a pill?

Re:The article is BS

[Kell Bengal]

Your personal physiology is identical to everyone elses', and so what worked for you will also work for every single other person on earth? Great! Spread the news! With this astounding insight, the obesity epidemic will be cured in no time!

Wait? What's that? You mean the metabolic pathways for storing and releasing energy are complex and very different from person to person? You mean that the body actively fights to retain fat stores when less energy is available resulting in crippling pain, headaches, listlessness, inability to cocentrate and insomnia? You mean to say that obesity is caused by numerous interrelated factors that each require corrective action in concert to be effective? It even says so in TFA? Well shucks!

Who'd have thought an illness that 100 million people are unable to cope with might actually be difficult to cure?? No, no! That can't be it. Let's just say they're lazy gluttonous porkchops so we don't have to find solutions to a difficult problem. So much easier for us to sleep well at night.