[pwinnski]

I'm aware that you're upset because of shortages in the medicine you need.

I think your beef should be with the pharma company seeking to maximize profits by constraining supply such that they are easily overwhelmed by off-label use, not with people seeking effective medical treatment.

There's a common meme among what I've seen from diabetics complaining about the shortages: that this is a tik-tok thing, or prompted by some celebrity, and the medicine is being take by people trying to lose ten lbs. I don't think any of that is true. Doctors are prescribing this for people who have medical conditions that make them dramatically overweight. My mother found relief from lipedema after decades of pain thanks to mounjaro, and she's facing the same shortages you are. She's done the half-doses and the quarter-doses and stretched them out until the pain came back.

Mounjaro is the best drug for a number of conditions, both the approved diabetes and some number of not-yet-approved conditions. Eli Lilly is maximizing profits in a way that leaves people with Type 2 diabetes and other painful conditions suffering. There's no need to blame social media for Eli Lilly's shortcomings.

[JaimeThompson]

>Doctors are prescribing this for people who have medical conditions that make them dramatically overweight

I know multiple people < 150 lbs who have gotten scrips for it with no history of diabetes.

[Vecr]

How tall are these <150lbs people? How old? Are they men or women? Do their doctors think they show signs of possibly getting diabetes in the future? Obviously if there's a 5'10" 25 year old male with negligible risk of diabetes, they should keep their current weight or even increase it slightly by changing their body composition from majority fat to majority muscle by doing exercise. If someone's short, old, can't exercise for some reason, and might get diabetes at some point, there could be a role for a drug there.

[finneganscat]

How many? Enough to make this comment anything other than a meaningless anecdote? I'm over 375lbs and nobody will prescribe it for me. There's my counter-anecdote.

[HDThoreaun]

There are online providers that are effectively just pill mills for these drugs if you're actually interested. They're' expensive though... https://joinnextmed.com/weight_loss

[JaimeThompson]

More than 10.

[WillPostForFood]

pharma company seeking to maximize profits by constraining supply

They have a monopoly on the drug, what's the evidence they are constraining supply? It makes no sense, the price is set, the more they supply the more money they make.

[agsqwe]

I think what's meant here it's that the manufacturer chose to target specific patient groups (T2D) and commercial insurances to get the highest profit per dose. About 40% of adults in the US are obese, they could have made the drug available at much lower cost and get their profits from economies of scale. Instead, the production is low and the focus is narrow.

[fakedang]

It's not always the case that production is made intentionally low. There are actual limits to how much times a chemical/biochemical production process can be run in a given year. I'm actually learning this the hard way with one biotech project.

The alternative might be a $200 million dollar production facility which may not even be feasible to cater to the excess of consumers. Or which may be too excessive for the excess of consumers targeted.

[bedast]

They also probably don't want to put significant investment in boosting production knowing that will be temporary since the weight loss effects aren't permanent. As someone who has been on GLP-1 RA for a decade, starting with Victoza, and now on Mounjaro, those weight loss benefits have no effect on me anymore. Delayed gastric emptying and appetite suppression is so far reduced that it might as well not be a thing anymore. But I don't use this drug for weight loss, I take it for glycemic management, and it still works great for that. I have to do the work to continue my weight loss and maintenance.

Yeah, these drugs aren't new but the wide world is just learning about the weight loss aspect. So they don't know this is a temporary solution.

[telotortium]

Perhaps the weight loss would be more permanent with the higher doses that are being approved for the weight loss use case?

[bedast]

You might get a good few years from the drug. You have to still do the work to make the changes permanent.

[richwater]

I swear people just say things without a shred of thinking.