Semaglutide is a signaling peptide, these are basically in a different class of medication that has traditionally been largely ignored. Partly due to difficulty defending patents for a class of medication that the body produces naturally, I.e. the instructions are in the DNA. Even if a drug company patents one GLP-1A they can’t patent all of them and any of them will work much the same way.

Because it’s a naturally occurring signaling peptide there already exist people who have too much of it and too little of it due to normal genetic variation.

We didn't even know what "junk DNA" did until like 25 years ago. We've discovered a couple new body parts in the last 50 years. We don't have any real understanding of how basic, foundational parts of medicine work - things like anesthesia and antidepressants and even pain differences between men and women. Tests are regularly performed on highly homogenous groups, or even tested on groups completely different from the target audience. The US allows us to advertise medicines on TV, and this gets people thinking they have some vague understanding of medicine - which they do not. I mean, maybe the unreasonably smart audience of this site may, but for the extreme majority of Americans, they do not.

I think our massive advancement in the computer industry has confused people into thinking other industries which use computers are also advanced, but this is not the case. Pharmacology is an extremely immature field.

Edit: I think the only field more immature than this would be psychology? And I don't think many are silly enough to trust a field who still worships a dude that believed every thought you had was somehow actually about sex, and has made zero advancements beyond borrowing meditation and a few other ideas from other cultures.

Jesus I can't tell if this comment is a joke or peak techbro arrogance.

I think your mind would break if you tried to learn what goes into modern drug design, like quantum chemistry.

Statistical analysis was basically invented to solve problems in psychology and biology, like measuring intelligence and understanding genetic inheritance.

Pretty much all the advancement in the computer industry is on the hardware side. Software engineering is the most immature field of them all.

Oh for sure - I didn't really consider software development because I barely consider it a practice - it literally slipped my mind. I refuse to call it software "engineering" because there's not a single real engineer in the field lol.

edit: I should clarify that I did indeed only mean computer hardware - that shit is incredible, and built by actual engineers. Imagine how incredible software could be if we had real engineers there, too.

I don't understand why comments about pharmaceutical companies and their incentives are accepted here, but if you mention the same in the context of vaccines, you're labeled a conspiracy nut.

There is a diverse set of opinions on this site. We don't all think the same.

Also, there's a distinction you're overlooking. Not trusting big pharma isn't the same thing as not trusting medicine. Big pharma will happily sell us drugs that work - it's the most profitable thing they do. You just can't trust them blindly, which is why regulation is important.

In the case of vaccines, they've proven effective over a very long time and the arguments against them are suspect at best. Questioning a new vaccine is healthy suspicion, questioning vaccines as a class of drugs requires a heavy burden of proof.

Healthy suspicion for the mRNA vaccines was not really accepted, was it?

So, the time to bring up concerns about an appropriately built fire exit is not while you are actively evacuating from the fire. Arguing that there may be dangerous long-term effects for a vaccine makes no sense when the alternative is the spread of a highly contagious and deadly disease. Nobody (who's thinking) gives a shit. The first concern is the disease. Now that we've gotten past covid, discussing whether or not we should use it elsewhere makes plenty of sense.

But of course, mRNA vaccines were being developed long before COVID, so I assume you raised you concerns at that time, and not in the middle of an emergency when nobody has time to explain to every third dumbass that we're going for the lesser harm here - meaning "not dead right now".

Assuming you're talking about the COVID vaccines, I don't know if I ever saw any healthy suspicion. The signal to noise ratio dropped to zero because it was a political football.

It's a good thing I'm not dictator, 'cause I'd have every news anchor and talking head that spread confusion during that time lined up against the wall and shot.