PJ Vogt

Yeah, but you should describe it because I guess the media listener probably has not been.

And so you're there now, and it sounds like the thing that, I mean, there are many things in common, the people you're working with in common, but the other thing that sounds shared is that

I think when a layman thinks about a doctor, it's a person you go to and they figure out what's wrong with you and they give you medicine.

And your experience of medical care is that oftentimes the job is as much about the social structures around people as just like treating their bodies because the things that are happening to their bodies and the social structures they're enmeshed in are so inseparable.

So there's nothing about anything you've described where my under-informed stereotypical view of the world you're treating would say, like, this is the pop culture sketch I have been given of ozempic users.

Can you just tell me the first time you heard about GLP-1s?

Like, when did they show up on your radar?

Yes.

2022 was the year for me of people whispering about it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was a medicine that was also a discourse object.

And it like scrambled all these...

There were so many relatively set battle lines and ideas about, as you said, like body positivity.

And then you had this thing, which just, it took this table and just like shook it really, really, really hard.

This yada yada discourse Dr. Bedard's referring to, that's what I was referencing in the beginning of this episode.

A season which yielded many essays from writers wondering out loud if these new drugs were just morally wrong.

To Dr. Bedard, the problem with these pieces is that they rarely seriously engaged with a world beyond the writer, their social circle, and celebrities on Instagram.

To Dr. Bedard, what was annoying in 2023 was how the conversation about these drugs gave almost all of its oxygen to their cosmetic attributes.

What did it mean for everybody's body image that thinness was now much easier to buy than it had been before?