[getnormality]

What you're communicating here, perhaps unintentionally, is that what matters is not results, but blame. If the doctor said what to do but the patient didn't do it, all that matters is the patient is to blame.

You've communicated that by ignoring or dismissing the question of whether better outcomes are possible through other means than demanding that everyone follow doctors' orders and blaming them if they don't.

"Who cares if better outcomes are possible, so long as blame is in the right place"? Is that how we want to approach this?

[recursive]

It's hard to help someone that doesn't want to be helped.

[getnormality]

Struggling to change is different from not wanting to change. People seem to have trouble with basic distinctions like this when they're heavy into moralizing failure to change.

[wjnc]

Profound point. My mother struggled with alcoholism and ultimately succumbed to that disease. In philosophy of mind they use “akrasia” and “akratic thinking” for acting against ones better judgement. It helped me somewhat getting to understand what my mother was going through at that time.

She wanted to change, tried a many multiple of times and it failed. Fault, guilt, blame are useless concepts to use on the Other. And only in moderation should they be applied to the Self. There deep disconnects between what we think, know and do.

[Terr_]

I find it helps to explicitly abandon the expectation that each person has a unitary and consistent will.

Bob the gambler wants to quit and wants to wager, sometimes sequentially and sometimes simultaneously.

The question isn't whether the whole Bob "means it", but which version of Bob we want to ally-with to war against the other, and what conditions or limitations we put on that assistance.

[joannanewsom]

Reading this thread it seems like you're the only one moralizing and looking down on people. I don't see anyone here shaming people for their choices. But somehow you seem to have read the worst interpretation of every reply.

[Retric]

Drugs expand what helping yourself means to the point where people will actually do so.

Statins, GLP-1 antagonists, etc isn’t magic, but it changes people’s behavior and bodies in such as way as to diminish the importance of willpower. Thus, it’s not that people are lacking instead our medicine is simply to primitive to help with a wide range of issues.

[DennisP]

Not that hard in this case. Just give them a pill.

[jaggederest]

Or, as we're becoming aware with GLP-1 drugs, an injection. (For now!). It's better to help people behave better with drugs than moral condemnation. Almost infinitely better, as it turns out, regarding a lot of problematic behavior regarded as "untreatable" previously.

[gropo]

Why not both?

[UltraSane]

The old adage "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink" applies here.

[vacuity]

It may not be the case for statins specifically, but my main concern is side effects. If there was a panacea, I would support giving it to everyone, but lifestyle changes are usually more available, if not easier.

[EasyMark]

Yeah this prickles my hackles too. It took a fairly high dosage of zepbound and many months for me to get to a normal set of eating habits after a couple of decades of bad, but a prediabetes scare surprise on my labs pushed me into the program, but I would not have done it by "white knuckling". I needed some medication to help me along. All these people just saying "calories in and calories out" "just start exercising dude" are making a complex issue into a "simple solution" that almost never works because change takes time; a lot of time that many people don't feel on a deep level that they have to apply to it. So, they just give up after a couple of weeks of "grit" and "will-power". Isn't it like maybe 1-3% succeed over time, while the rest fail when trying to lose significant weight or other health issues that could be resolved with habit only?

[calenti]

To me the terms mix and it helps to separate the things that are externally manageable from the things that are not. The physical is complex but straightforward - the body biochemistry operates on material in, biochemistry mix, expenditure out. The brain is physical - neurons, pathways, etc. The mind, OTOH, is a virtual little candle isolated in a prison of meat and bone trying to understand how to interact with the world around it. External forces can alter the body and brain, but only the mind can change the mind. And does, in ways that are very difficult to control because the sole operator is part of the mechanism. People who try to change on their own and can't aren't failing or weak, it's just really f-ing hard.