The Problem With Conflations

Now that Mounjaro has finally been launched in India, it will not take much time before, like in the US, it becomes a recourse for those wanting to reduce their weight. Yet, this is a medicine developed for manag­ing diabetes and what is extraordinarily useful in one area need not be so salutary elsewhere. The risks that diabetics face out of uncontrolled weight gain is very different. It is essentially an ailment in which the excess glucose in the blood is not processed and so circulates in the body. Organs are relentlessly bathed in glucose and over time this takes a toll—diabetics go blind, lose limbs, are more prone to heart disease, suffer from nerve damage and much more if the disease is not managed. Glucose is created when food, especially carbohydrates, is consumed and the more obese one is, a fallout of the ailment itself, the more one eats, trapping the patient in a vicious circle.

Drugs like Mounjaro and Ozempic mimic certain hormones that signal the body is satiated and so the trigger signals for wanting to eat are drastically reduced. You just don’t feel hungry. You therefore eat less, there is less glucose in the body and the diabetes remains under control. Even for extremely obese people, this will be useful because that is also a condi­tion of life-threatening complications. But in countries abroad where these drugs are available, mild or moderately overweight people are taking them and there the equation becomes different. These are new medicines and long-term side effects are still being studied. Reasonably healthy people don’t need such a potent weapon when they can achieve the same with lifestyle changes. That is the principle for almost all medication. Take when only necessary. For mild insomnia or anxiety, doctors will not prescribe pills because medicines come with some side effects, or the body builds tolerance and the quantity has to be increased over time.

That has not stopped sleeping pills and anti-depressants still getting over-prescribed and abused. Chances are the same will happen with these new-generation, anti-obesity medications.

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