Dr. Rachel Bedard

And that's just particularly visible.

And the social sort of circumstances for my patients are just so particularly crushing and throwing up obstacles so they're being able to take care of their bodies the way that we would

want them to, that a lot of what the doctor ends up doing is sort of negotiating with the world on behalf of my patients to get them things I think they need.

The other thing I would say is that because my patient population, you know, health is socially determined to a large degree.

So like when you describe, like you go to the doctor, you say something's wrong with you and they give you a medicine, you're picturing going for like strep throat or something, right?

Yeah.

Or I have the flu and I want Tamiflu because that's the experience of people who aren't sick.

But my patient population is sick, so they are living with illness all the time.

And when they are coming to me, they're not coming necessarily with a new complaint so much as we are in this constant process of trying to modify their experience of illnesses that they live with chronically.

Yes.

So, right, exactly.

And this is sort of my whole interest in these medicines to a large degree.

So GLP-1s have been around for a really long time.

Like, some version of GLP-1s have been around for almost 20 years.

There were sort of like first-generation GLP-1 medications that were only used for diabetics.

So I've known about those medicines for a really long time.

But the sort of GLP-1's class that is like the ozempic generation and then everything that's followed really came on the radar like 2021, 2022.

And I think the first time I sort of started paying attention to them was when I read about them in mainstream media, not in medical literature.

Because, especially like those very early months, like they weren't accessible to be prescribed.

Extremely expensive.