Dr. Rachel Bedard

You know, like we don't totally have exactly that data, but we have 20 years of data about this class of medicines.

And we have a pretty good sense of there is a very narrow slice of the population who they're totally inappropriate for.

If you've had a family history of certain rare cancers for the majority of people.

giving them a shot and seeing how you tolerate is totally appropriate and fine.

And so this friend, like, took them... He didn't identify as an alcoholic, but he identified someone who wanted to drink less and who drank daily.

And for this friend, he...

took them for six months or something or four months, totally changed his relationship to drinking.

I think he's been off now for a little while, and he said he's not back to drinking the way that he was.

He feels that relationship feels altered for him, even if he's not as suppressed in his desire as he maybe was when he was on the medicine week after week.

I think that I think that it is both GLP-1s and peptides, to some degree, are part of a larger shift in health wellness medicine, which is...

This like paradigm shift between thinking of medicines as things that we use to treat illness to thinking of pharmaceutical products as something that we offer people to help them feel the way they want to feel.

It's a complicated shift, I think.

So, you know, the better example to me than peptides is like the use of hormone supplementation for a million different indications, right?

Like that's another huge discourse.

It's like, you know...

Women taking estrogen supplementation in their early 40s when they start to feel what they self-diagnose as perimenopausal symptoms.

Women on testosterone, there's been a bunch of essays about that.

Men on testosterone, you know, like it's a very different way of conceptualizing the rule of healthcare than men.

It's not why I went into healthcare, and it's also different from the sort of paradigm I trained in.

But I'm also a little bit trying to remain neutral about this in thinking about the changing relationship between patients and providers to one that's a more sort of shared goal setting, shared decision making model.