#pharma articles

[shirkers2018dirsanditan]

The ideal female body of the past decade, born through the godless alliance of Instagram and the Kardashian family, was as juicy and uncanny as a silicone-injected peach. Young women all over the Internet copied the shape—a sculpted waist, an enormous ass, hips that spread generously underneath a high-cut bikini—and also the face atop it, a contoured hybrid of recognizably human mannequin and sexy feline. This prototype was as technologically mediated as the era that produced it; women attained the look by injecting artificial substances, removing natural ones, and altering photographic evidence.

Dana Omari, a registered dietitian and an Instagram influencer in Houston, has accumulated a quarter of a million followers by documenting the blepharoplasties, breast implants, and Brazilian butt lifts of the rich and famous. Recently, she noticed that the human weathervanes of the social-media beauty standard were spinning in a new direction. The Kardashians were shrinking. Having previously appropriated styles created by Black women, they were now leaning into a skinnier, whiter ideal. Kim dropped twenty-one pounds before the Met Gala, where she wore a dress made famous by Marilyn Monroe; Khloé, who has spoken in the past about struggling with her weight, posted fortieth-birthday photos in which she looked as slim and blond as a Barbie. All over Instagram, the wealthy and the professionally attractive were showing newly prominent clavicles and rib cages. Last spring, Omari shared with her followers the open secret behind such striking thinness: the Kardashians and others, she insisted, were likely taking semaglutide, the active ingredient in the medication Ozempic. “This is the ‘diabetic shot’ for weight loss everyone’s been talking about,” she wrote. “Really good sources have told me that Kim and Khloé allegedly started on their Ozempic journey last year.” Omari was about to start taking a version of the medication herself.

Ozempic, which is manufactured by Novo Nordisk, is part of an expanding class of drugs called GLP-1 receptor agonists, which have dramatically altered the treatment of diabetes and obesity. Ozempic is approved by the Food and Drug Administration only for the treatment of Type 2 diabetes—a condition that accounts for ninety per cent of all diabetes cases—and has been available since 2017. Its name is now shorthand for the entire category of weight-loss injections. In 2021, Novo Nordisk received approval for Wegovy, which has the same active ingredient as Ozempic but comes with a higher maximum dose, as an anti-obesity drug. On a year-end earnings call in 2022, Novo Nordisk cited worldwide market growth of fifty per cent, with almost forty thousand new Wegovy prescriptions being written every week.

The drugs mimic a hormone called glucagon-like peptide-1, which stimulates insulin production and suppresses the production of glucagon, which raises blood sugar. The body naturally releases GLP-1 after a meal, and the hormone travels to the brain, triggering the feeling of fullness. GLP-1 drugs effectively inject that sense of satiety, and also slow the rate at which food empties out of the stomach; patients generally report a freedom from cravings and an inability to overeat without becoming ill. “I’m convinced that this basically replaced a signal my body has been missing my whole life,” a commenter in a Reddit group for people using semaglutide wrote recently. “All I can say,” a member of an online group called Lose the Fat wrote, “is that it is no wonder that skinny people think heavy people have no willpower. Their brains actually do tell them to stop eating. I had no idea.”

More than forty per cent of Americans are obese, and eleven per cent have been given a diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes. Both conditions involve metabolic dysfunction: Type 2 diabetes is characterized by resistance to insulin, a trait that tends to develop as a person gains fat; insulin resistance leads to high blood sugar, which increases the risk of stroke, heart disease, nerve damage, and more. Obesity is correlated with, among other things, higher rates of cancer, sleep apnea, and liver disease. For people living with these risks, the new medications may be a godsend. “These drugs are groundbreaking,” Dr. Cole Barfield, an internal-medicine specialist in Nashville, told me, noting that they can spur greater weight loss and more effectively decrease blood-sugar levels than previous frontline treatments—and, unlike many other medications for these conditions, they do not put patients at risk of major cardiovascular events.

There are, however, complications. Initial side effects (diarrhea, vomiting, constipation, dizziness, nausea) can be gnarly enough to send people to the E.R. Patients can also experience hair loss, a result that—like the gaunt look that has been termed, not without Schadenfreude, “Ozempic face”—is caused by rapid weight loss rather than by the drug itself. In rare cases, patients might develop renal failure, pancreatitis, or intestinal obstruction. Also, GLP-1 drugs are expensive—often more than a thousand dollars a month out of pocket—and insurance companies frequently refuse to cover them. (Weight-loss drugs are not required to be covered by Medicaid.) Still, about a year ago, Barfield noticed an influx of patients who came in asking for Ozempic by name. “I’d guess this was probably when people started posting TikToks about the celebrities being on it,” he said.

“Everyone is suddenly showing up 25 pounds lighter,” Andy Cohen, the TV producer who created the “Real Housewives” franchise, tweeted in September. “What happens when they stop taking #Ozempic?????” Celebrities have generally denied the accusation. “I get up 5 days a week at 6am to train,” Khloé Kardashian wrote on Instagram. “Please stop with your assumptions.” Omari stifled a giggle when I asked her about such denials, which tend to be, subtly or otherwise, less than categorical. One can, and should, exercise in addition to taking GLP-1 drugs. And you can say you’re not taking Ozempic if you’re actually taking Mounjaro—a newer, similar drug, manufactured by Eli Lilly & Co., that is producing even more drastic results in clinical studies—or if you’re getting an off-brand version of the medication from a compounding pharmacy. Such pharmacies, which offer custom medications, often make drugs for people who have allergies to common ingredients, or who need commercially unavailable dosages, or who can swallow a liquid but not pills. But they are also allowed to compound drugs that are on a list kept by the F.D.A. of drugs that are in short supply, as low-dose Ozempic now is. (The shortage is not of the medication but of the devices used to inject it, which Novo Nordisk has not been able to manufacture fast enough to meet demand.) “I’m on compounded semaglutide, and I will tell you, I eat like a toddler,” Omari told her followers in January.

It is possible to imagine a different universe in which the discovery of semaglutide was an unalloyed good—a powerful tool to untangle the knot of genetic tendencies, environmental forces, and behaviors that conspire to make more and more Americans gain weight. We might recognize metabolism and appetite as biological facts rather than as moral choices; rising rates of Type 2 diabetes and obesity around the globe could be reversed. In the actual universe that we inhabit, the people who most need semaglutide often struggle to get it, and its arrival seems to have prompted less a public consideration of what it means to be fat than a renewed fixation on being thin.

In the Renaissance and for centuries afterward, the Platonic ideal of the female body in the West was defined by proportionality: Rubens’s expressive fleshiness, the gentle undulations of Botticelli’s Venus. Then the Industrial Revolution produced increasingly sedentary life styles and easier access to food, not to mention standardized dress sizes. The diet industry roared to life: thyroid extract was packed into pills and sold under names such as Corpulin and Frank J. Kellogg’s Safe Fat Reducer; there were “reducing salons” where women could have their flesh rolled and squeezed by machines. Women’s magazines enshrined the idea that high-class whiteness could be expressed through a thin body, and articulated a horror of fat and of cultures that valued it. An essay published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1897 refers to fatness as a “crime” and a “deformity,” and argues that a fat woman “will not be a social success unless she burnt-cork herself, don beads, and then go to that burning clime where women, like pigs, are valued at so much a pound.”

People have been pushing back against fat stigma since at least the nineteen-sixties, when activists staged a “fat-in” at the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. But the desire to achieve thinness by any means necessary—amphetamines, grapefruit diets, SlimFast—remains an almost foundational tenet of female socialization. When I was a preteen, in the heroin-chic nineties, pro-anorexia Web sites proliferated on the Internet; in the early two-thousands, teen girls puked or did obsessive sit-ups or took Hydroxycut in pursuit of abs like Britney Spears’s. In the twenty-tens, even as the Kardashians ostentatiously displayed their curves, they sold Flat Tummy Co. teas—laxatives—and waist trainers. And young women now are just a tap away from a never-ending social-media parade of aspirational bodies. A Harvard study, drawing on data from the Implicit Association Test, which asks people to sort words and images into “good” and “bad” categories, found that implicit bias against fat people actually grew from 2007 to 2016, with eighty-one per cent of people exhibiting it by the end of the study. Every other implicit bias in the study—regarding race, gender, sexual orientation, age, and disability—waned during that period.

The cultural fear of fat plays a role in the negative outcomes associated with it. Doctors—about a third of whom, in one study, reported viewing their obese patients as “sloppy” and “lazy”—frequently misdiagnose, undertreat, or shame fat people, who then accumulate reasons to distrust medical care. (In one notable case, a forty-six-year-old woman went to see an obesity specialist at Georgetown University, complaining of shortness of breath; he told her she should go on a diet. It turned out that she had life-threatening blood clots.) Obesity correlates with poverty, and Black and Hispanic adults are more likely to be fat than white ones; the general attitude toward fat people allows an aversion to poor people and nonwhites to be expressed as moral concern. The belief that fatness in itself is neither ugly nor alarming is sometimes misinterpreted, ingenuously or otherwise, as a complete disregard for the connection between health and weight gain. I recently went to a doctor’s appointment in uptown Manhattan, during which it came up in conversation that I was writing about Ozempic. The doctor put down her stethoscope and turned to me. “You know, I love Lizzo,” she said immediately. “But it’s a shame that this whole body-positivity movement has made so many people think that it’s O.K. to be obese.”

In fact, both thinness and fatness can be the result of disordered eating, and both are dangerous at the extremes. In 1958, a physiologist named Ancel Keys initiated a long-term study in seven countries concerning the relationship between diet and cardiac health; later, analyzing the data, he found that very thin and very heavy people carried the greatest risks for heart disease. But Keys concentrated his worry on obesity, a condition he referred to as “disgusting” and “repugnant.” He revived something called the Quetelet Index—concocted in the nineteenth century by the Belgian mathematician Adolphe Quetelet, in an effort to identify the statistically average man (“the type of perfection,” Quetelet called him)—and gave it a new name: the body-mass index. By the nineteen-eighties, B.M.I. had become the standard method of assessing a person’s health via her weight.

Today, someone’s weight is deemed healthy if her B.M.I. falls between 18 and 24.9; between 25 and 30, a person is overweight; beyond that, she has obesity. But Quetelet’s research subjects were European men, and his formula is less accurate at indicating the health of women and of people who are Black, Hispanic, or Asian. More generally, the index implies a precise weight-to-health correlation that does not actually exist. A recent study examined subjects’ B.M.I.s in relation to their blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and insulin resistance. Nearly a third of people with a “normal” B.M.I. had unhealthy metabolic metrics, and nearly half of those who were technically overweight were metabolically healthy. About a quarter of those who were classified as obese were healthy, too.

A healthy body can generally signal to the brain when it has had enough food. But that signalling system can be faulty, or get injured. “One of the most important things about obesity, and something most people don’t understand, is that, in the process of gaining weight, the neural circuitry of the brain that regulates weight is damaged,” Dr. Louis Aronne, the director of the Comprehensive Weight Control Center, at Weill Cornell Medicine, told me. (Aronne, like many other prominent practitioners of obesity medicine, has consulted on trials conducted by Novo Nordisk.) “The hypothalamus shows signs of inflammation and injury,” he went on. The prevailing theory, he explained, is that “too many calories coming in too quickly damages nerves that respond to the hormones that control body weight.” One of these hormones is leptin, which is produced in body fat, and which signals to the brain that it’s time to stop eating. But, if you gain fat, the oversupply of leptin can cause your body to be desensitized to it, making your brain erroneously believe that you are starving. “Your body tries to rebalance the system by slowing down the metabolism and increasing appetite,” Aronne said. After a person has gained enough weight to enter this cycle of metabolic misdirection, it becomes nearly impossible to lose that weight and keep it off long-term simply through diet and exercise. (About five per cent of people manage to do it.) A well-known study followed contestants on “The Biggest Loser,” the weight-loss-competition show, and found that the contestants’ metabolisms slowed so drastically after their weight loss that nearly all of them regained what they’d lost. One contestant, who’d dropped an astonishing two hundred and thirty-nine pounds, soon regained a hundred, and then began gaining weight whenever he ate more than eight hundred calories less than the average amount recommended for a man his size.

“No one in my family is skinny—we’re just not built that way,” Jamel Corona, a thirty-seven-year-old Mexican American mother of two in Illinois, told me. Corona had been overweight for most of her life, she said; she was a size 12 in sixth grade. “I’ve never had a bad relationship with food, and I’ve always worked out,” she said. In college, she ate the same amount as the girls she lived with in her sorority house, but she was bigger, and gaining weight. Later, when she got pregnant, she developed gestational diabetes. (Diabetes also ran in her family, with most of her aunts and uncles dealing with Type 2.) During her second pregnancy, she had to give herself daily insulin injections; her blood-sugar levels “just kept going up and up and up.” After she gave birth, she gained forty pounds in her first three months postpartum. Her endocrinologist suggested Wegovy. “It was either that I try this, or that I would come back in six months and probably go on insulin again,” she said.

When Corona started on Wegovy, the side effects were awful—fatigue, nausea, months of severe insomnia. She joined a Facebook support group, where members counselled her that foods that were processed, fried, or high in carbohydrates or sugar tended to make people on GLP-1 medications feel sick. Corona told me, “If I tried to eat a whole burrito bowl at Chipotle, I would feel so physically ill I would have to call off work.” She could no longer handle alcohol, and had little desire to drink it, another common side effect. “One day we went out to a brewery and I had three beers in four hours, and I was throwing up afterward, as drunk as if I’d had a whole keg,” she said. “I decided to never have beer again.” (Anecdotally, doctors and patients have reported that these medications can decrease a range of dopamine-seeking behaviors, including online shopping.) She started hiking and running, which she hadn’t been able to do when she was heavier; she went to the gym every day, first thing in the morning. At the time we spoke, she had been taking Wegovy for a year, and had lost fifty pounds. She told me she felt like an entirely different person, energized and strong.

“Let’s be honest,” she said. “I was not healthy at over two hundred and twenty pounds, being five-four.” She needed something to get her back to a state of equilibrium, and semaglutide appears to have done it. “If we get past this as a celebrity-weight-loss headline story, and we see this for what it really is, it’s revolutionary,” she said. “In the future it might be like taking vitamins. Everyone’s going to be on it.”

This past November, I created an account on a telehealth Web site that looked as though it had been designed in about forty-five minutes using stock images and a free template. I filled out a form that asked for my height, my weight, and my reason for wanting semaglutide. I entered a weight that gave me a B.M.I. of 30. This was a lie, and I expected to be caught out during the Zoom appointment that I assumed was coming. Instead, a nurse practitioner named Nicole sent me a direct message laced with cheerful emojis. “My extensive experience allows me to provide a very wide range of services to you,” she said, adding prayer hands. She warned me that it was hard to get Ozempic covered by insurance; I replied that I would be happy to pay out of pocket.

“My patients, YOU, are suffering,” she wrote back. She said that she could connect me with a compounding pharmacy to get me three months’ worth of low-cost semaglutide. “This NEW alternate option I am providing is for ALL patients, even those with stubborn insurance, no insurance, or government insurance,” she wrote. It would cost two hundred and fifty dollars, and the fee for my “visit” would be a hundred and fifty dollars. She thanked me for my patience “during this time when it is very difficult to obtain weight loss assistance.” I asked if she would help me manage the side effects, but got no reply. I wrote again and asked to move forward with the prescription.

A few days later, I received a small cardboard box from Clearwater, Florida, in the mail. Inside was a baggie containing alcohol pads, orange-tipped single-use insulin syringes, and a vial of bacteriostatic water. Another baggie contained a two-inch vial of clear liquid—this was the semaglutide—plus a syringe with an alarmingly long needle and a single sheet of instructions for how to mix the semaglutide with the bacteriostatic water and inject myself.

The over-all vibe of this package did not inspire confidence. (Semaglutide is supposed to come in temperature-controlled packaging, and it did not.) Still, when I told people about my semaglutide stash, they were intrigued. “Should I take it and be your guinea pig?” a friend asked. I reminded him that he was already skinny. “I’m Gigi Hadid skinny,” he replied. “I could be Bella Hadid skinny.” He was kidding, sort of.

I became curious whether I could get a prescription without lying about my weight. I found the Web site of a telehealth clinic advertising semaglutide, and, this time, entered my real height and weight, that of a woman who wears a size 4. A practitioner called me the next morning; I told him that I’d had a baby in 2020 and wanted to lose fifteen pounds. “Our program is meant for this exact kind of case,” he said. He discussed side effects—“the only one to really be worried about is mild nausea”—and told me that I wouldn’t need to do any blood work or visit a doctor. “It’s very mild, it’s a peptide,” he said. “It just balances everything out.”

Novo Nordisk has patented semaglutide, and the company has insisted that it does not sell the medication for compounding purposes, which raises the question of what compounding pharmacies are providing to their customers. These pharmacies have to comply with regulations set by state pharmacy boards and the F.D.A., and they are required to source ingredients from F.D.A.-registered suppliers, but the F.D.A. does not approve or verify compounded drugs, and the pharmacies—there are about seventy-five hundred in the United States—are primarily monitored through inspections. The rules that govern them are, a prominent figure in the compounding industry told me, “under-enforced.”

I wrote to the telehealth clinic and asked to be put in touch with its pharmacy. A co-owner of the clinic called me a few minutes later. He said that the pharmacy they used, which is also based in Florida, was selling semaglutide sodium—the salt form of the drug molecule, which is easily obtainable for bulk purchase online as a research chemical. Most drugs can be prepared in different chemical formulations, but the F.D.A. requires clinical studies of each formulation to prove safety and efficacy, and it has not approved semaglutide sodium for compounding. The Alliance for Pharmacy Compounding has suggested that semaglutide sodium “should not be used for human compounding,” and is “not a substitute for semaglutide base.” But the clinic owner insisted that, for the purposes of weight loss, semaglutide sodium was “the same thing,” and that the business with the F.D.A. was just politics. “Ozempic is so expensive here because our health-care system is capitalistic,” he said. “In socialistic health-care systems, in Europe, you can get a month’s supply for a hundred and fifty dollars.” (This is not far off—it costs about two hundred dollars in the United Kingdom.) He assured me that I could trust the Florida pharmacy and its products: it was, he claimed, where all the Hollywood celebrities got their stuff. He also said that semaglutide sodium was in such high demand that the pharmacy was testing semaglutide acetate, which hasn’t been approved for compounding by the F.D.A., either.

I asked the prominent figure from the compounding industry about the legality of compounding pharmacies using semaglutide sodium. He described it as a “gray area.” “When you dissolve semaglutide sodium in water, you end up with semaglutide base and sodium ions,” he said. He also insisted that “the F.D.A. knows this is going on, and they haven’t said a word.”

Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk together have at least twelve more obesity medications in development. Novo Nordisk reportedly spent about a hundred million dollars advertising Ozempic last year, and the two companies are spending roughly ten million dollars annually on lobbying. A primary focus of that lobbying is the proposed Treat and Reduce Obesity Act, which has been introduced in congressional sessions annually since 2012, and which would require Medicare to cover, among other treatments, chronic-weight-management drugs. Anticipating the passage of this bill within the next few years, Morgan Stanley has forecast that U.S. revenue from such drugs will increase four-hundredfold by the end of the decade. Obesity looks “set to become the next blockbuster pharma category,” it declared, in a report last year, which also predicted that social media and word of mouth will create an “exponential virtuous cycle” around the new medications: a quarter of people with obesity will seek treatment from physicians, up from the current seven per cent, and more than half of those who do will begin taking medicine. In March, WeightWatchers acquired the telehealth weight-loss company Sequence, which specializes in prescribing GLP-1 drugs.

Controversially, the American Pediatric Association recently included weight-loss medication and bariatric surgery as part of a set of treatments that physicians should consider for kids with obesity. (Bariatric surgery, previously the only medical intervention that resulted in lasting weight loss for more than a small percentage of people, works in part because it, too, increases GLP-1 levels, and does so before any weight loss has occurred.) In clinical trials, patients who go off GLP-1 drugs regain much of their lost weight within a year. I asked Dr. Aronne, from Weill Cornell, about the possible medical consequences of irregular lifetime use, which seems to be a likely outcome for many patients, especially those who are prescribed the drugs at an early age. “That’s a great question,” he said, “and we don’t have the answer.” He suggested that doctors might begin treating obesity the way they treat hypertension. “You could start people on a tiny dose per week, and they would never get to the place where they have catastrophic problems,” he said. Patients would still need regular blood work and other monitoring; it’s likely enough that, as these drugs come into use in a wider patient population than ever before, new risks and complications will arise. But to Aronne, who has treated patients with serious health complications related to weight for thirty years, a lifetime on Wegovy seems far less dangerous than a lifetime of severe obesity.

I had been wondering, I told Aronne, about the extent to which the excitement around this new class of drugs took the broader status quo more or less for granted. Many obesity-related health problems are worsened by circumstances that could be helped through policy—by raising the minimum wage high enough for people to afford fresh produce and high-quality protein, by investing in housing and community spaces that are conducive to recreation, by ending the billions of dollars in farm subsidies that go to junk-food additives, such as high-fructose corn syrup. “These things would work to prevent obesity, not treat it,” Aronne said. “It would be like trying to treat lung cancer through a smoking-cessation program.” This was the point I was trying to make—that we have an individual solution, but we need collective ones, too.

Omari, the Instagram-famous dietitian, is now off her compounded semaglutide, which she’d taken to shed some pandemic pounds. She was optimistic that she’d be able to maintain her weight, as she’d generally been able to do before. But, as I kept reminding Ozempic-curious friends, these medications were designed for chronic conditions, obesity and diabetes. For people who are dealing with those conditions, Ozempic appears to create a path toward a healthy relationship to food. For those who aren’t, it might function more like an injectable eating disorder. As the side effects make clear, it’s not a casual thing to drastically alter your body’s metabolic process, and there is no large-scale data about the safety of these drugs when taken by people who are mainly interested in treating another chronic condition, the desire to be thin.

Once Ozempic is off the shortage list, compounding pharmacies will no longer be allowed to sell semaglutide, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll stop: the pharmacy in Clearwater that supplied my stash told me that they’d sold semaglutide before the shortage and would continue to do so after it ended. Jonathan Kaplan, who oversees the weight-loss program at Pacific Heights Plastic Surgery, in San Francisco, told me that he saw a “glimmer of hope” in tirzepatide, the active ingredient in Mounjaro: that drug is on the shortage list, too, and compounding pharmacies were already gearing up to sell it. In the meantime, Pacific Heights, which prescribes compounded semaglutide to patients who meet the medical criteria, and also provides blood-work monitoring and life-style coaching, has warned the members of its mailing list that compounded semaglutide may soon become unavailable. “You may want to join our program now so that we can reserve a 6-month supply of the medication for you,” the clinic added.

Kaplan, a plastic surgeon, is better known on TikTok as @RealDrBae—in his videos, he wears navy scrubs monogrammed “DR BAE” and talks to the camera as though it’s his partner in an absorbing conversation at an airport bar. He believes that more people—a lot more people—are going to start taking GLP-1 drugs soon. He didn’t have in mind thin people who want to be thinner, he added; he was thinking about fat people who had been struggling with discomfort, with inconvenience, with social pressure all their lives, who might have lately felt encouraged to try to accept their heavier weight. He predicted that the Ozempic era would put an end to all that. “They’re no longer going to accept that they should just be happy with the body they have,” he said. ♦

[swamyworld]

Article: Patanjali has done well, but the pharma industry is full of ridiculous advertisements, who will take care of it? - not just patanjali in the dock

Author- Kishore PatwardhanEvidence-based medicines are built on three pillars – patient choice, doctor experience and the latest available evidence. Misinformation weakens all three and this is what makes the Patanjali case going on in the Supreme Court critical. In an affidavit filed in the Supreme Court this week, the Uttarakhand State Licensing Authority said it has suspended the manufacturing…

[defenderoftheearth]

Epidemic of fraud,un film censuré que nous vous présentons

Si vous cherchez ce film qui vient d’être produit,vous pourriez chercher pendant des heures,car ce film remet le syst`me politique corrompu dans lequel nous vivons. Aussi,nous,de la Nouvelle Société du Vril,avons décidé de le mettre à la disposition de tous! Voici,le film:     Assurez-vous de bien avoir vu ce film,car il est fait de façon  intègre et apporte la lumière sur  la fraude et la…

[fatliberation]

I saw a comment on your blog that says 'the way you eat does not cause diabetes'...are you able to expand on that or provide a source I could read? I've been told by doctors that my pre-diabetes was due to weight gain because I get more hungry on my anti psychotics and I'd like to fact check what they've told me! Thank you so much!

Pre-diabetes was rejected as a diagnosis by the World Health Organization (although it is used by the US and UK) - the correct term for the condition is impaired glucose tolerance. Approximately 2% of people with "pre-diabetes" go on to develop diabetes per year. You heard that right - TWO PERCENT. Most diabetics actually skip the pre-diabetic phase.

There are currently no treatments for pre-diabetes besides intentional weight loss. (Hmm, that's convenient, right?) There has yet to be evidence that losing weight prevents progression from pre-diabetes to T2DM beyond a year. Interestingly, drug companies are trying to persuade the medical world to start treating patients earlier and earlier. They are using the term “pre-diabetes” to sell their drugs (including Wegovy, a weight-loss drug). Surgeons are using it to sell weight loss surgery. Everyone’s a winner, right? Not patients. Especially fat patients.

Check out these articles:

Prediabetes: The epidemic that never was, and shouldn’t be

The war on ‘prediabetes' could be a boon for pharma—but is it good medicine?

Also - I love what Dr. Asher Larmie @fatdoctorUK has to say about T2DM and insulin resistance, so here's one of their threads I pulled from Twitter:

1️⃣ You can't prevent insulin resistance. It's coded in your DNA. It may be impacted by your environment. Studies have shown it has nothing to do with your BMI.

2️⃣ The term "pre-diabetes" is a PR stunt. The correct term is impaired glucose tolerance (or impaired fasting glucose) which is sometimes referred to as intermittent hyperglycemia. It does not predict T2DM. It is best ignored and tested for every 3-5yrs.

3️⃣ there is no evidence that losing weight prevents diabetes. That's because you can't reverse insulin resistance. You can possibly postpone it by 2yrs? Furthermore there is evidence that those who are fat at the time of diagnosis fair much better than those who are thin.

4️⃣ Weight loss does not reverse diabetes in the VAST majority of people. Those that do reverse it are usually thinner with recent onset T2DM and a low A1c. Only a tiny minority can sustain that over 2yrs. Weight loss does not improve A1c levels beyond 2 yrs either.

5️⃣ Weight loss in T2DM does not improve macrovascular or microvascular health outcomes beyond 2 years. In fact, weight loss in diabetics is associated with increased mortality and morbidity (although it is not clear why). Weight cycling is known to impacts A1c levels.

6️⃣ Weight GAIN does NOT increase the risk of cardiovascular OR all causes mortality in diabetics. In fact, one might even go so far as to say that it's better to be fat and diabetic than to be thin and diabetic.

Dr. Larmie cites 18 peer reviewed journal articles (most from the last decade) that are included in their webinar on the subject, linked below.

[faultfalha]

What does it mean when the short interest in a company rises? Is it a sign of confidence, or is it a sign of doubt? What secrets does this company hold, and why are people so interested in it? There is something strange about Zealand Pharma A/S. It's a small, unknown company, and yet the interest in it is so high. Why are people so curious about it? What secrets does it hold? Some say that the company is plotting to take over the world. Others say that it's developing a new, revolutionary drug. No one knows for sure what's going on, but the speculation is driving the stock prices up. There's something about Zealand Pharma A/S that's just not right. Why is the short interest in the company so high? What are people expecting to happen?

[dailyhealthcarefacts]

The health benefits of a healthy vegan diet are seemingly endless. The only downside is that it’s challenging to find a balanced, healthy diet that includes both plant-based and animal-based foods. You can find a variety of plant-based and animal-based foods in one grocery store, but not in each aisle. The only real difference between a vegan diet and a vegetarian diet is in the amount of protein consumed.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Uncle Sam paid to develop a cancer drug and now one guy will get to charge whatever he wants for it

Today (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. Tomorrow (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

The argument for pharma patents: making new medicines is expensive, and medicines are how we save ourselves from cancer and other diseases. Therefore, we will award government-backed monopolies – patents – to pharma companies so they will have an incentive to invest their shareholders' capital in research.

There's plenty wrong with this argument. For one thing, pharma companies use their monopoly winnings to sell drugs, not invent drugs. For every dollar pharma spends on research, it spends three dollars on marketing:

https://www.bu.edu/sph/files/2015/05/Pharmaceutical-Marketing-and-Research-Spending-APHA-21-Oct-01.pdf

And that "R&D" isn't what you're thinking of, either. Most R&D spending goes to "evergreening" – coming up with minor variations on existing drugs in a bid to extend those patents for years or decades:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3680578/

Evergreening got a lot of attention recently when John Green rained down righteous fire upon Johnson & Johnson for their sneaky tricks to prevent poor people from accessing affordable TB meds, prompting this excellent explainer from the Arm and A Leg Podcast:

https://armandalegshow.com/episode/john-green-part-1/

Another thing those monopoly profits are useful for: "pay for delay," where pharma companies bribe generic manufacturers not to make cheap versions of drugs whose patents have expired. Sure, it's illegal, but that doesn't stop 'em:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/competition-enforcement/pay-delay

But it's their money, right? If they want to spend it on bribes or evergreening or marketing, at least some of that money is going into drugs that'll keep you and the people you love from enduring unimaginable pain or dying slowly and hard. Surely that warrants a patent.

Let's say it does. But what about when a pharma company gets a patent on a life-saving drug that the public paid to develop, test and refine? Publicly funded work is presumptively in the public domain, from NASA R&D to the photos that park rangers shoot of our national parks. The public pays to produce this work, so it should belong to the public, right?

That was the deal – until Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980. Under Bayh-Dole, government-funded inventions are given away – to for-profit corporations, who get to charge us whatever they want to access the things we paid to make. The basis for this is a racist hoax called "The Tragedy Of the Commons," written by the eugenicist white supremacist Garrett Hardin and published by Science in 1968:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/01/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-how-ecofascism-was-smuggled-into-mainstream-thought/

Hardin invented an imaginary history in which "commons" – things owned and shared by a community – are inevitably overrun by selfish assholes, a fact that prompts nice people to also overrun these commons, so as to get some value out of them before they are gobbled up by people who read Garrett Hardin essays.

Hardin asserted this as a historical fact, but he cited no instances in which it happened. But when the Nobel-winning Elinor Ostrom actually went and looked at how commons are managed, she found that they are robust and stable over long time periods, and are a supremely efficient way of managing resources:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/analytical-democratic-theory/#epistocratic-delusions

The reason Hardin invented an imaginary history of tragic commons was to justify enclosure: moving things that the public owned and used freely into private ownership. Or, to put it more bluntly, Hardin invented a pseudoscientific justification for giving away parks, roads and schools to rich people and letting them charge us to use them.

To arrive at this fantasy, Hardin deployed one of the most important analytical tools of modern economics: introspection. As Ely Devons put it: "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

Hardin's hoax swept from the fringes to the center and became received wisdom – so much so that by 1980, Senators Birch Bayh and Bob Dole were able to pass a law that gave away publicly funded medicine to private firms, because otherwise these inventions would be "overgrazed" by greedy people, denying the public access to livesaving drugs.

On September 21, the NIH quietly published an announcement of one of these pharmaceutical transfers, buried in a list of 31 patent assignments in the Federal Register:

https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2023-20487.pdf

The transfer in question is a patent for using T-cell receptors (TCRs) to treat solid tumors from HPV, one of the only patents for treating solid tumors with TCRs. The beneficiary of this transfer is Scarlet TCR, a Delaware company with no website or SEC filings and ownership shrouded in mystery:

https://www.bizapedia.com/de/scarlet-tcr-inc.html

One person who pays attention to this sort of thing is James Love, co-founder of Knowledge Ecology International, a nonprofit that has worked for decades for access to medicines. Love sleuthed out at least one person behind Scarlet TCR: Christian Hinrichs, a researcher at Rutgers who used to work at the NIH's National Cancer Institute:

https://www.nih.gov/research-training/lasker-clinical-research-scholars/tenured-former-scholars

Love presumes Hinrichs is the owner of Scarlet TCR, but neither the NIH nor Scarlet TCR nor Hinrichs will confirm it. Hinrichs was one of the publicly-funded researchers who worked on the new TCR therapy, for which he received a salary.

This new drug was paid for out of the public purse. The basic R&D – salaries for Hinrichs and his collaborators, as well as funding for their facilities – came out of NIH grants. So did the funding for the initial Phase I trial, and the ongoing large Phase II trial.

As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, the proposed patent transfer will make Hinrichs a very wealthy man (Love calls it "generational wealth"):

https://prospect.org/health/2023-10-18-nih-how-to-become-billionaire-program/

This wealth will come by charging us – the public – to access a drug that we paid to produce. The public took all the risks to develop this drug, and Hinrichs stands to become a billionaire by reaping the rewards – rewards that will come by extracting fortunes from terrified people who don't want to die from tumors that are eating them alive.

The transfer of this patent is indefensible. The government isn't even waiting until the Phase II trials are complete to hand over our commonly owned science.

But there's still time. The NIH is about to get a new director, Monica Bertagnolli – Hinrichs's former boss – who will need to go before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee for confirmation. Love is hoping that the confirmation hearing will present an opportunity to question Bertagnolli about the transfer – specifically, why the drug isn't being nonexclusively licensed to lots of drug companies who will have to compete to sell the cheapest possible version.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/19/solid-tumors/#t-cell-receptors

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[ruben-the-cowboy]

I feel like modern Dutch loves conspiracy,

Like he is constantly reading articles about Big Pharma (though I believe that’s real) and then going on rants to Hosea (daily) and the rest of his family (when they visit) about it.

He also loves watching those true crime documentaries or the Forensic Files series right before he sleeps and then wakes himself (and Hosea) up, and then panic calls Arthur/John/Tilly at 3:00AM to make sure them and their kids are still alive.

(He’s just a worried dad with a strange hobby/hyperfixation guys)

[pharmafocusasiamagazine]

Role of miRNAs in Neurodegeneration Diseases

Bidisha Roy, Department of Biological Sciences, Rutgers University shared her views with Pharma Focus Asia.

This article highlights the relevance of studying brain-enriched miRNAs, the mechanisms underlying their regulation of target gene expression, their dysregulation leading to progressive neurodegeneration, and their potential for biomarker marker and therapeutic intervention. This article has been written to emphasize ways for the effective diagnosis and prevention of these neurodegenerative disorders in the near future.

Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Parkinson’s disease (PD), Huntington’s disease (HD), and Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) are a group of age-related progressive disorders initiated by the neuronal loss that eventually leads to cognitive and movement disorders. These diseases are thought to be caused by alterations to protein-coding genes. Non-coding RNAs participate in translational regulation and comprise 95 per cent of total human cellular RNAs.

Read More: https://www.pharmafocusasia.com/research-development/role-mirnas-neurodegeneration

[reality-detective]

The only positive outcome of the Covid ‘vaccines’ is that it has made people question the safety of ALL vaccines.

“The introduction of bacterial childhood vaccinations, not only caused the targeted infections to become more widespread, but other bacterial infections also emerged and evolved into more dangerous strains. This new reality prompted the creation of more vaccines, which in turn has accelerated this “downward spiral” and boosted “Big Pharma profits.” 🤔

Full article: 👇

Just a reminder for people 🤔

[dosesofcommonsense]

From BioClandestine on Telegram

If Trump wins 2024, he will halt all funding for Ukraine, negotiate an end to conflict with Putin, thus preventing WW3.

The reason Biden and the Deep State cannot negotiate with Putin, is because Putin wants their heads for crimes against humanity, namely for manufacturing C19.

This is not speculation on my part. Russian MIL literally listed Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and George Soros, as being the main ideologists behind the plot to manufacture coronavirus strains in Ukraine, with US DoD funding, and there is an open source paper trail to back it up. You can debate on whether or not you believe them, but the reality is, Putin wants the “Western Elites” and Xi agrees with him.

It’s not hyperbolic to say that this is life or death for the Deep State actors. If Trump wins and negotiates a settlement with Putin, Russian MIL have already been demanding for activation of Articles V and VI of the Biological Weapons Treaty, which would result in a Security Council investigation and international military tribunals. That’s what Russian MIL have been demanding at the UN for nearly 2 years now. And that’s just the biological stuff, not even accounting for the whole 2014 coup, shelling the Donbas, funding and supporting Ukraine in 2022, Nord Stream, etc.

What do you think Trump is going to say? No? Trump wants to prosecute the exact same people for crimes against humanity! Putin is literally demanding that all of Trump’s enemies trying to imprison him, must be prosecuted by military tribunal… How could Trump say no to that?! He’d be killing multiple birds with one stone. And Trump’s DOJ wouldn’t have to do the prosecuting. It would be a coalition of military judges from different countries around the world. It would be far more legitimate and no way could the Dems cry “partisanship”. It’s international law.

Y’all might think it’s crazy, but this is the trajectory we are headed on if Trump wins, which is why the Biden regime are going to do everything in their power to prevent Trump from winning. If they fail, they will be treated as international war criminals, and will face the ultimate penalty.

Extinction Level Event (for the deep state, for globalism, for all their synvophants in levels of government and the MSM).

Let’s say Russia and China are lying, and the US did not manufacture C19.

Then why would Fauci, Collins, and the US government, put so much effort into covering up the lab origins?

Why are the US and their allies the only ones NOT interested in who caused a global pandemic?

Why did government health agencies and Big Tech censor scientists and journalists who pointed out its lab origins? If someone else created this virus, why are the US government so invested in covering up who is responsible? Over a million Americans died, shouldn’t they be tirelessly trying to find out who killed all those people?

Who benefited from the pandemic? American Pharmaceutical companies, that began the vaccine development BEFORE the pandemic. Who funds the MSM and Deep State politicians? Big Pharma.

If Russia and China are lying, why is it that the US veto every request at the UN Security Council for a joint investigation into the origins of C19?

There are two options. Elements within the US are responsible, or, a different entity is responsible and the US government went out of their way to cover it up.

The paper trail confirms it’s the former, but either way, heads must roll.

[vague-humanoid]

Sci-hub is the piratebay of academic journal articles. Its service is mostly illegal because it collects paywalled articles and makes them publicly available online via an indexed search. This is copyright infringement. People love it. The coverage is incredible, many journals have over 98% of their articles covered.

Frustrated with a lack of access to scientific articles, Alexandra Elbakyan of Kazakhstan founded the Sci-hub repository as a 20-year-old graduate student. Her site subsequently provided more open access to scientific knowledge than anyone in the history of science. She was named a person of the year in 2016 by Nature; yes, that Nature of the mega-profit-publisher Springer Nature who promotes open access by charging a 10 grand APC.

Reminiscent of the RAA’s takedown of Napster in 2001, Elsevier took legal action against Sci-hub in 2015 starting in the U.S. and quickly moving to other countries. This international campaign has to do with copyright law being organized by country, making it very difficult to pursue Sci-hub which exists in a cyberspace of mirrors, and it provides something that is unquestionably in the public interest and a basic UN human right.

Although there are allegations of security breaches that could lead to identity theft or other hacking university servers, I am not aware of a single piece of evidence Sci-hub has done anything other than ‘steal’ academic publications. It is not a threat to sovereign nation states, it doesn’t encourage sociopathic behavior. It is a form of rebellion against the plague that for-profit publishing unleashed on science, and a way to promote open science. Of course Elsevier was not wrong in its legal claim of copyright infringement. Elsevier wants researchers to pay for their articles and its minions see Sci-hub as causing profit losses. But the evidence suggests this is nonsense. Elsevier is wasting its time, precious time that it could use to sponsor arms fairs, create journals and sell them to big pharma or try to patent online peer review and force journals to pay to use it.

[naturalrights-retard]

by Paul Craig Roberts

World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General and Big Pharma Shill Tedros Ghebreyesus has called on countries to sign on to WHO’s pandemic treaty so the world can prepare for “Disease X.” 

Ghebreyesus, speaking in front of an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos last Wednesday, said that he hoped countries would reach a pandemic agreement by May to address this “common enemy.”

Scientists on Big Pharma and WHO’s payroll say the unknown and hypothetical virus “could be 20 times deadlier than COVID-19.”

WHO is a political and propaganda organization, not a health organization.  

Notice that WHO is predicting in advance of its appearance a new 20 times more deadly virus.  So WHO is claiming a crystal ball that reveals the future.  Why does it only reveal future viruses?

Notice that WHO knows in advance that the unknown and hypothetical virus is very deadly.

Notice that none of these things can possibly be known before they happen.

There is an effort long underway to take all control over health decisions out of the hands of doctors and patients.  The WHO “treaty” is likely designed by Bill Gates, Fauci, and Big Pharma.  It is an instrument of tyranny.  It will be used to prevent effective treatment against whatever pathogen is next released.

Notice that WHO’s prediction is an indication that another released virus will soon be on its way to us.

Notice that these predictions are coming from the Bill Gates/WEF crowd that is intent on reducing the world population by 7.5 billion lives, effectively a genocide of the human race.

Notice that the politicians and media are doing nothing to alert the public and that the organized attempt to destroy your control over your health is meeting faint resistance.

[thefreethoughtprojectcom]

Internal corporate communications — millions of pages — are now available. They can be searched online at the Opioid Industry Documents Archive, hosted by University of California San Francisco or highlighted in this article!

Read More: https://thefreethoughtproject.com/health/how-big-pharma-got-americans-addicted-to-opioids

#TheFreeThoughtProject #TFTP