Ozempic
person
Don't believe everything you thinkThe liminal space Veteran
Ozempic is a drug originally designed and used to treat diabetes. When using it people found it helped them lose weight by cutting down on their cravings. As such its use boomed among the well to do as a weight loss drug. More recently with the surge those using it have also noticed that it reduced other cravings such as for alcohol or even gambling. With the boom in demand and the drug patent its running off label users something like $1,000 a month, so it will be a while before the hoi poloi can make use of it.
One part of me thinks this is great and has the potential to reduce one of Buddhism's big three sources of suffering, craving. The other part of me envisions a dystopian future where we're all consuming some future iteration of this and have lost all motivation to do anything.
It also occurs to me to wonder what the economic implications of widespread usage of this would be?
Comments
Hopefully it wean us of economies of scalies and dinos ...
It’s not as unattainable as it once was…for some people.. I know several middle income women who have taken it for weight loss, and my own Dr tried to push it on me. Several insurance companies cover it ( copays vary, of course).The problem was diabetics with no insurance or who were on a fixed income couldn’t afford it, and once it became the fad for weight loss, supplies dropped. That being said….you can’t take it forever, and the results are not permanent. The cravings return.
AFA fostering ‘motivation’….the Buddhist POV would be intentions and right effort.
I had heard about it… the thing is, I’m reasonably good at not eating a lot, and still not losing much weight, so I think my metabolism is just unusually proficient at adjusting. So I doubt whether reduced cravings would help me much, those are not my problem.
Although I’m not immune to the occasional snaccident.
(“Snaccident. Noun. When you accidentally eat all of a snack.”)
"Don't do drugs" (lobster top tip)
Yep, it's always that way. To eliminate craving, you have to understand the cause of craving. The cause is, ultimately, ignorance. Deal with the cause.
See: Dependent Origination
Yay…love a good homework assignment
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/ignorance.html
The cause is, ultimately, ignorance.
Pretty sure that craving is caused by the fact that, in the human brain, the limbic system handles motivation and the cerebral cortex handles storytelling and context. The limbic system functions in support of keeping humans alive long enough to make more humans, and the cerebral cortex handles all the stuff that we consciously experience; emotions, sensory tasks, memory, thinking, thinking about thinking, conceptualizing the past and the future, reasoning, language, problem solving, etc.
The limbic system, including your nervous system, handles motivation chemically, by rewarding us with good feels when we do things which, instinctively, keep our genes moving on (eating, sex, community, physical safety, etc). Those good feels are associated, subconsciously, with our memories of those experiences. The good feels fade as the brain does it's "re-uptake" of the hormones that created them. Also happening subconsciously, associations are made between the brain/body-state and memories of when we don't achieve the stuff that keeps our genes moving (food, sex, community, physical safety, etc), creating aversion. We experience craving, clinging, aversion, and striving for MORE, even in the face of abundance, because there's no convincing the non-thinky part of our brain to be reasonable. Buddhism puts the cerebral cortex more in the driver's seat. Every bit of complexity that piles on top of that is just context which the cerebral cortex handles in our life story.
If the Buddha were alive today, I think he'd include neuroscience under the tent labelled Prajna/Panna. Accepting the materialistic laws of nature is a part of accepting reality.
All my humble opinion.
I think the difference between what you're saying and Buddhist teachings, is that you're talking about synapses firing and Buddhism is about mind. The brain is an organ, while mind is a phenomenon.
What I wonder about, sometimes, is that we can observe synapses firing for something like "craving". My question - is mind (craving) caused by the brain, or is the brain reacting to the craving?
We're living in a rather unique time in human history evolution. For all of that time the condition humans struggled against was deprivation and malnutrition. Now the greater problem facing most people in the developed world is how to curb our excesses. The craving for more in the past was something that helped people survive and thrive. Much of what I've gotten from Buddhism has helped me live more simply, has helped me be content and grateful for what I have and where I am rather than always striving for more and better.
Is Ozempic an answer? If so, is that the world we want to live in? Feels a little too Brave New World to me.
Edit: The word better isn't sitting completely right with me. On the one hand I do have a level of acceptance with the way things are. On the other hand I do put effort into being a better person, on doing things that will improve not only my own life, but the lives of others. Maybe its a bit like that phrase from Shunryu Suzuki — 'Each of you is perfect the way you are ... and you can use a little improvement.'
I like this question and have spent a fair bit of time learning and thinking about it. Clearly there is a strong link between the two, but I am now of the opinion that the relation is something like a projector and the film. Where the brain is like the film with all the information and the mind is like the light of the projector that gives that information a field of experience. Like the difference between unconscious and conscious thoughts, why isn't everything we do unconscious?
Mostly though I just don't know and am curious about what is going on.
@IdleChater, respectfully, I think that the biggest difference is 2500 years. My understanding is that the mind isn't 1 thing, just like the self isn't 1 thing. The mind is the concept which humans use to describe our experience of having a brain which is capable of metacognition, aka thinking about thought.
There are a few different methods of detecting and identifying neurotransmitters in the brain, the names of which methods I can read and pronounce but mostly not explain. Neuroscientists have tested the timing relationship between the emergence, duration, and dissipation of these chemicals, and the awareness of the "minds" which experience their effects. As a matter of fact, literally everything that happens in the brain does so before we become aware.
For me personally, I find the most "immoral" part of Ozempic use for weightloss is that it's denying diabetics access to a treatment necessary for their health and life. Denying a diabetic access to necessary medication because you want a quick fix is about as UN-Rightful Action as one can get IMHO.
I've been seeing comments recently about Ozempic causing a lot of muscle loss with its use. One person saying that a friend of his who takes it has lost weight but also lost yards off of his golf drive. I haven't really looked into the validity of this, but this seems to be how these sorts of miracle solutions go.