It feels like everyday a new paper is published showing either massive levels of compounds that interfere with endocrine system in the blood. Microplastics, being the biggest one. So when I see headlines like this, "Cancer is up in young people." I can't help but sigh and think, this is expected.
I'm not sure what the right course of action here is, but do we really want to continue with a model where we continue pumping new and unknown compounds into our bodies and the ecosystem with little thought to the downstream impacts?
Some of these compounds have made our lives orders of magnitude better and yet they are wreaking havoc in our lives in ways we'll probably never understand.
> I'm not sure what the right course of action here is, but do we really want to continue with a model where we continue pumping new and unknown compounds into our bodies and the ecosystem with little thought to the downstream impacts?
Well based on how people act, yes I do think we're happy to continue to pump new and unknown compounds into our bodies.
Just take Covid vaccines and Ozempic as recent examples. I'm not here to argue the efficacy or safety of the vaccines, but we all must agree they were new and unknown. That was at least driven by fears of the unknown risk of a novel pathogen, Ozempic is driven by the promise of a miracle cure for obesity.
Semaglutide (Ozempic) was first tested in 2008 if I'm not mistaken, those trials were for type II diabetes. It was only tested for obesity in 2021.
Its reasonable to expect that any serious side effects would hit you whether you are diabetic or obese. The concern I have is how many people are taking it today for cosmetic or vanity reasons rather than because they are morbidly obese and nothing else has worked.
We do know thanks to trials that it seemed safe and effective when tested on a few thousand people. We don't know what happens when someone takes it for decades, or the rest of their life.
I am absolutely not saying there are known side effects that make it more dangerous than what they put on the box. But it is a new and unknown medication being used by a pretty large population today. More importantly to my original point, those taking it almost certainly didn't read the medical research first so it is an unknown to them.
I'm not sure what the right course of action here is, but do we really want to continue with a model where we continue pumping new and unknown compounds into our bodies and the ecosystem with little thought to the downstream impacts?
Some of these compounds have made our lives orders of magnitude better and yet they are wreaking havoc in our lives in ways we'll probably never understand.