gimmie drugs!

I was reading an article about 3 drugs being tested out, and I had been "on a roll" talking about diet pills recently, so I was moved to check out the next wave of potential future pharmaceutical failures. I have to admit, reading the article did make me feel like there is more focused effort to address the origins of obesity rather than trying to block fat absorption or some other body tricking patch.

Like always, appetite suppression is going to be the main theme. The approach to achieve that suppression is the reason for so many potential drugs to be used. This, in my opinion, is more evidence that all diet drugs are basically "experimental" long after they are released because one drug will be like a magic cure for some people, but unfortunately for others, the same drug may cause a reaction that ranges from mild, to severe, to possible death.

What I found very interesting was the possible inclusion of Bupropion being mixed with naltrexone to be sold under the name Contrave. Why is this interesting? If you read the wiki article about bupropion, it was once marketed as wellbutrin, which was pulled because at it's original 400mg dosage, it caused seizures! They lower the dose and sell it as zyban to quit smoking. What I find to be really strange is that when the dosage is given in relation to studies in obesity, that dosage was jacked right back up to 400mg, where it had been pulled as wellbutrin. Wow, the shrink'em or "shak'em" strategy is in affect. Even the article that talks about the new drug points out:

"The most common side effects included nausea, constipation and headache. The most severe side effects were one case of gall bladder infection and one person who had seizures. More than 3,000 people were included in the study, but around 40 percent of them dropped out of the trial."

So, because the dosage is now "time release" there is supposed to be less of a chance of seizures due to the higher absorption? One poor guy had seizures, and somewhere a research assistant was like "ah, was waiting for one of them to do that" because they knew that wellbutrin lowers seizure threshold and so does buproprion.

All of this information is right there in front of you to be found and thought seriously upon. Do you take the blue pill or the red pill? Do you want to die because you were too fat or do you want to die from whatever damage takes place to your brain during a freaking seizure. Anything to be thin right? This stuff hasn't even come out yet and obviously there are some issues going on that my non medical trained butt can figure out pretty quickly with the information age in affect.

I don't think I want to pick on all 3 of the drugs right now, except to say that we are in for a wave of drugs already approved for other uses that are being used in obesity strategies simply because those drugs were already researched under other conditions. What bothers me is in the way that the metobolic system of an obese individual may cause a vulnerability to some symptoms that may not have appeared in an otherwise "average size" group of research volunteers. If I was participating in a drug trial, I wonder what it would feel like if I was closer to a seizure than I have ever been in my life? I wonder how a lab tech would handle a medical emergency. I would hope that the research assistants who work with the obese would at least be prepared to physically handle someone who needed to be transported to a real medical facility!

One thing with all these drugs is for sure. If one does happen to work, you will be paying for it and taking it every day for the rest of your life, if it doesn't get pulled because it killed a few hundred people who were taking it for years.

I guess it could be worth losing "some weight" (permanently?) if I took a pill every day for the rest of my life. I wonder how much it would cost? Would it have those nasty side affects on me? What will it do to me, or any human, after taking it for over a decade?

Anti-depressants offer so much promise in the field of psychiatry, but unfortunately, they seem to be some of the most dangerous drugs around. I have to go back to the balance, and realize that you simply can't cheat nature. If your depressed, if your big, if your anything, your body is talking to you. I don't think that the body will be satisfied when it calls by feeding it a chemical or cutting it open to challenge millions of years of evolution and change stuff around.

To everything there is a root cause, and to take a shortcut is to miss out on what that cause is entirely. Pills can be great for some things, but when our culture has a corresponding pill for every "problem", there will be further problems because we, as a race, are taking a shortcut and refusing to acknowledge the root cause of so many things. Maybe obesity is just one of several indicators to let us know, as the beings that inhabit this planet, that we are further out of balance with nature than ever in our race's history or evolution.

I don't want to close this post without acknowledging the fact that at least one of the drugs had an original use involving addiction! This was kind of a shock to me, because in my research I have not found too many drugs that actually attempt to confront what one of the main roots to obesity is... Food addiction! I know that my view on that has been addressed slightly, and I will bring it up again here. The way any addiction is treated is by totally taking away the addictive substance. In the case of food addiction this is simply not an option.

I have been wondering how the issue of curing addiction without restricting the object of addiction would work. An opioid receptor antagonist is great for blocking the positive rush of ingesting an opioid, and a norepinephrine and dopamine reuptake inhibitor seem great for flooding the brain with extra dopamine to prevent compulsive behavior. The problem with food addiction is that food is necessary, so when the behavior of taking in too much food or grazing is comforting or relaxing, I am not sure that inhibiting dopamine reuptake is going to do the trick. Maybe when combined with the mental frame of mind of wanting to take a pill to control eating, it may actually cause just enough of a difference in the "eating rush" to cut down on binges.

The research shows that some people lost more weight than the "control group" who did not get the drug, so it does work for some people. I can never argue that kind of science, but I can express concern that taking another pill brings a realm of negative probabilities that are never discovered until a bunch of people have already gotten hurt by them. If "diet and excersize" is what this is all really about, why would there be 3 drugs at a time being introduced? If a drug company knows a certain dosage caused a drug to be pulled because of seizures, why would they continue to do the research with the same dosage when considering it for this new "diet cocktail" type drug? Why do I ask why when we know cash is king? :) Let me finally close then by saying if you want to take Contrave, go ahead, but I sincerely hope you are not one of the few who have seizures in the process. I know that this condition is rare, and those individuals may have been prone to seizures or already had a low threshold, but it's sad that the compulsion and/or desperation to change one's size is going to equate into a process of obese natural selection.