Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Having been alive before the US went into hambeast mode, I note that the poor weren't fat fucks back then.
Eating habits changed, ideas of personal responsibility changed DRASTICALLY, and self-destructive behaviors became accepted.
Dear fatasses:
You are not "big", a "BBW", "thick", etc. You are a tub of shit by choice and no respect is owed that choice because it is so very self-destructive. If you defend that choice, no respect is owed to you as a person because that level of stupidity is more disgusting than your rolls. Do what you will but don't expect validation.
Put down the fork, stop snacking, purge your home and life of junk food, and toughen the fuck up. People today HATE that message because they are willing to be conditioned to passivity.
I do a lot of my shopping at Walmart (due to location) and when I changed my eating habits it cost LESS than buying shit. There are many aisles in a super market you can and should completely ignore. Eating healthy doesn't suck and there is plenty of tasty good food made available by the same businesses who will sell you garbage if that's what you want.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."