You’re The Perfect Specimen

Welcome to the clinical trial. Tens of millions of us are volunteers in the world’s biggest medical study. Only, the study isn’t being run by doctors. It’s being run by us. GLP-1s were first introduced to lower blood sugar in people suffering from Type 2 diabetes. We quickly learned that those same drugs tended to make people lose weight, often a lot of it. As if that weren’t enough of a medical holy grail, we’ve since been getting reports that these drugs with names like Ozempic and Mounjaro help with symptoms of long Covid, IBS, addiction, depression, concussions, and much more. These anecdotal results have been supercharged by the wellness and longevity craze, and the use of these drugs is now wildly outpacing researchers’ ability to study them (or their potential downsides). In the spirit of the modern era, we’re all doing our own research. You have become your own doctor. How much more primary can care get than that? Julia Belluz in the NYT (Gift Article): The Great Ozempic Experiment. “Technology moves fast, while science accumulates slowly. Humans have a history of rushing ahead with new technology, well before understanding how it affects us. (Just think of smartphones and ultraprocessed foods.) Still, GLP-1s may be a medical first: a blockbuster drug class, enthusiastically taken up by millions, not for one or a few uses but, it appears, a multitude.” (Is being a guinea pig in an unprecedented human experiment making you feel anxious? Don’t worry. GLP-1s can reduce anxiety, too.)