The FDA is currently on the verge of approving the first diet pill in over a decade. Contrave, made by Orexigen Therapeutics, combines two existing drugs: Bupropion, the popular antidepressant and smoking-cessation medication, and naltrexone, used to counter alcohol addiction. This combination aims to boost metabolism and decreases appetite in order to help people lose weight.
Given that we are in the midst of an obesity epidemic here in the United States, an effective diet pill is certainly something that society could use. But the FDA has been wary to approve many diet pills, because they are risky in terms of side effects. The justification for Contrave comes from observation of its component drugs over a prolonged period of time, and the fact that a lot of data has been gathered from research already.
While Contrave is certainly not going to revolutionize weight loss, as it is only a tiny bit more effective than the traditional diet and exercise regime, it will certainly become very widely used if approved.
But are commercially available diet pills really what America needs right now? Yes, certain people are obese for clinical and medical reasons, and so pills are a valid method for these people, who played no hand in their condition. However, most of the obese became that way due to poor choice of lifestyle and diet. Thus, pills are for most people a quick, easy and painless way to lose weight and 'fix' some fault, while allowing them to continue indulging themselves. But what if we take the situation to the extreme: for example, what if incredibly effective pills were to become available, and their usage became commonplace (a very likely scenario given how drug-happy the population already is)? Everyone would simply indulge their greed and laziness and take the diet pills as a tool to indulge these other moral vices. By using diet pills in order to improve ourselves aren't we somehow compromising our sense of respect for ourselves, and the moral value of hard work and self disciple (Or even, Sandel's "giftedness")? Perhaps diet pills are a form of enhancement that ought to be treated with wariness for reasons other than just the risk of bad side effects.
http://theweek.com/article/index/210159/will-contrave-revolutionize-dieting
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
The issue with weight loss pills is not that they cause us to lose giftedness, but that they cause an unhealthy dependency on the drug. No matter how effective the drug is, it still won’t work in the long run, because the causes of obesity are behavioral, not chemical. People become obese because they choose to live in a particular way, in which they eat unhealthy food, and do not get enough exercise.
These weight loss drugs cannot substitute for willpower. If you do not make changes to the way you live, and stick with them in the long run, you cannot lose the weight and keep it off. These pills keep you dependent on their influence to keep the weight off, and they don’t build healthy habits in the long run. The physical side effects are not as dangerous as the psychological ones. Dependence on the weight loss effects of the drugs leads to relapses and weight gain when the medication is stopped. This sort of dependency is not healthy. It makes sense to use them for short term weight loss, but people have a tendency to gain the weight back when they stop taking the medication.
It is not a loss of giftedness, but the fact that they are used as a crutch, and allow other skills to atrophy, so that when the medication is no longer being used, the skills needed to maintain a healthy weight are not there.
http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/f-d-a-panel-backs-new-diet-pill/
Post a Comment