chiefdave
Well-Known Member
Just reading the article, very interesting stuff. Can't help but feel we need to move faster with this. The article states 1 in 8 adults in the US using these type of drugs. Increasingly they are covered by health insurance as the cost over the long term works out far far cheaper.
But here they are near impossible to get on the NHS even after the previous government promised to fast track them to as many people as possible after initial trials produced astonishing results. Just this week it has been reported that this will be pushed out to 1.6m brits. Sounds good right? Problem is that's over 12 years!
think this is still a big problem. I first went to the docs about my weight in 2010, I've been through pretty much every service the NHS has to offer and frankly they are not fit for purpose. During the pandemic I ended up having a long conversation with a specialist at Walsgrave who happened to be covering when I went in for some respiratory tests.
Without naming these drugs, which weren't being publicised then, he said he was hopefully we were finally going to move away from "eat less, move more". As he pointed out we've been prescribing that for decades and in people who seek assistance from the NHS regarding weight the failure rate is over 99% He said this simply wouldn't happen with any other treatment, if you trialed a cancer drug with less than 1% success rate it would be binned.
He also said that in all honesty many doctors don't believe what you're telling them if you're not losing weight. Even in the medical community there is an assumption that it is your fault.
He likened it to when doctors endorsed smoking and that in the not to distant future we could see lawsuits against companies promised weight watchers similar to those we saw against tobacco companies.