Dr. Rachel Bedard
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
One thing is that it just highlighted how much cultural discourse about bodies, even illness, medicine, people's experience of their bodies, really almost never reflects the experience of people who are actually ill.
So, you know, type 2 diabetes is like one of the most common chronic conditions that Americans live with.
It's really, can be really terrible, right?
Like millions of people in this country have had a limb amputated because their diabetes was sufficiently bad that they had vascular complications where they stopped getting blood flow to a limb and they had to lose a leg, you know?
There are half a million people in the U.S.
who are on dialysis, which means that three times a week they go for several hours and sit in a recliner in a room full of people in recliners hooked up to huge IV catheters that are exchanging their blood through this, like, blood-washing machine, dialysis machine.
That's a wild way to live, right?
Imagine if you had to do that.
And those experiences are never reflected in first-person writing about illness in the mainstream media.
They're almost never actually described, I think, in, you know, the publications that, like, I read, both for news and pleasure.
I think for as long as I can remember, I have been reading an essay a week about what it's like to be a white lady who doesn't feel great about her weight.
That is a constant in my life through many changes in the world.
And the idea that this breakthrough class of medications that had the potential to revolutionize, like, chronic disease population health in the U.S.
potentially changed the expected mortality for Americans, like, that it was all sort of being funneled into this same discourse and also processed using the same types of anxieties and neuroses that were sort of the themes that I've been reading about my whole life, like, was really annoying to me.
When we're talking about GLP-1s as a class, we're talking about this class of medications.
The first one actually came out in 2005.
But, like, this popular conversation is referring to the ones that have come out in the last couple of years.