Phentermine
All the main research into the safety and effectiveness of Phentermine was performed more than fifty years ago as it was being prepared for launch in 1959. After it received Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval as an appetite suppressant, very little new research has been undertaken into Phentermine itself. There has, of course, been a major and continuing effort to investigate the problems of obesity and the effectiveness of the various strategies to treat it.
In 2005, a seminar run by the National Obesity Forum, recorded the alarming fact that excess body weight is the sixth most significant factor when assessing the risks of disease among populations world wide. Taking the global view, 1.1bn adults and ten percent of all children are now classified as overweight or obese. Average life expectancy is already falling across the affected classes of people. Research is still ongoing to unravel the complexity of the interaction between genetics and environmental factors as the cause of this impending health crisis. Once fact is already apparent. Where children are born to wealthy parents, their genetic inheritance appears to give them better survival prospects. Children born to impoverished parents have greater risks because their mothers were undernourished during pregnancy and the children were inadequately fed immediately after birth, were more prone to illness and disease, and so on.
In all cultures and age groups, the problems are compounded by the change in lifestyles. The shift from heavy physical labour in agriculture and factory environments to more mechanised and service environments reduces the levels of physical activity. Children are also more protected and no longer play outside, running and exercising with their peers. They spend more time sitting in front of computer screens playing games. More people also passively overeat. There is no biological need for this additional food intake. Rather some cultures demand generous portions as a sign of social success and affluence. Others retain the cultural model that carrying weight is sexually attractive and/or evidence of wealth in a family worth marrying into.
For obvious reasons, we cannot sugar-coat the medical truth. Obesity is now classified as a chronic disease. It affects millions of people across the majority of countries in the world. Because other illnesses and diseases are more likely if people carry excessive weight, long-term therapy is required both to treat those other conditions and to produce weight loss. One strategy is to use drug therapy. In other chronic conditions such as diabetes or high blood pressure, there are prescription medications. Phentermine and other medications are available to help control weight.
There can be no doubt that individuals only achieve long-term weight loss if they make sometimes radical changes to their diet, to the portion sizes they eat, and to their activity levels. There is little that the national health services can do other than to increase health education as a preventative measure and increasingly divert scarce medical resources away from the treatment of accident and emergency cases to the treatment of this preventable set of diseases and illnesses.
At a state level, the cost of medications and the problems of dependence dictate that most of the prescription weight-loss medications are only prescribed to patients who are at increased medical risk because of their weight, i.e. where their BMI is above 27 with associated problems of high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels, etc. or above BMI 30 with no developed additional problems. These medications are not usually prescribed for “cosmetic” weight loss. Although, of course, individuals are free to spend their own money as they think fit.
The accumulated research into all problems associated with obesity shows that when the antiobesity medications are used under proper medical supervision and in combination with a program of healthy eating and regular physical activity, good weight loss is achieved and most of the side effects experienced by patients are relatively mild and do not last long. However, serious problems do arise if some of the medications are abused and other more serious adverse reactions occur in a small number of patients. One of the difficulties in making a judgement about these medications is that few of the studies last for more than two years. It would be useful for the researchers to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of weight loss medications over significantly longer periods of time.
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