Dr. Rachel Bedard

Exactly.

Exactly.

And it was so unexpected, frankly, right?

Because one of the sort of truisms up until this class of medicines was,

was we didn't have a magic pill for weight loss, right?

That there had been sort of all of these prior cultural moments, like Fen-Phen in the 90s, where there had been like a hot discourse object medicine to help people magically shed pounds.

Nothing prior to GLP-1s had been

proven safe in a way that it could be sort of a sustained intervention for people.

Nothing really worked that well.

Whereas like all of a sudden people were taking Ozempic, it seemed safe, they were tolerating it okay, and they were losing 15 pounds in five weeks.

And that, it was just so unprecedented in its efficacy.

Like we hadn't had anything like that before.

I mean, like these drugs, by the end of 2023, we knew that they had an all-cause mortality benefit.

Like

That's unbelievable as an outcome.

There are very few things in medicine where you can show that it prevents people from dying over a very short period of time of taking the drug.

And this did that.

And so, like, it was really an incredible, from a medical perspective, it was super exciting.

And at the same time, there was this, like, weight loss, body image, yada yada discourse that was totally divorced from the actual medical impacts of the drugs.

I was annoyed on a bunch of different levels.