This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

We should be wary of campaigns by pharmaceutical companies to destigmatize obesity, say experts in The BMJ. Michael Viggars and colleagues argue that, while destigmatizing obesity is the right thing to do, there is a risk that companies profiting from obesity treatment come to influence public conversation and national policy.

They point to Eli Lilly's U.K. "Obesity Is a Disease" campaign, which explains that obesity is a complex disease rather than a failure of willpower, that the body can resist weight loss, and that people who have struggled for years deserve compassion, not blame.

Advertisements invite people to check their body mass index, answer a few questions and prepare for a conversation with a doctor, nurse or pharmacist. Although drugs are not mentioned, the campaign is by a pharmaceutical company whose drug tirzepatide is now a principal treatment for obesity.

Almost everything the campaign says about stigma is true, note the authors. The framing is at once scientifically defensible and commercially useful, and that convergence, they say, is exactly what makes it harder to criticize.

"This is what the commercial determinants of health look like in their subtlest form," they argue. "We spot commercial influence far less readily when it arrives wrapped in the language of compassion and destigmatization that public health has spent years cultivating."

The risk is not mainly that more people will be prescribed weight loss drugs; for eligible patients that is a clear benefit, they write.

Source link