Dr. Pri

Chemo has begun…

Take too much Ozempic, and your brain stops wanting things: food, sex, even the urge to get out of bed. People end up in hospital beds for days, staring at the ceiling, feeling nothing. The medical name for that state is anhedonia, and it tells you how the drug actually works. Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro all belong to the same drug family, called GLP-1s. They kill hunger. They also quiet almost every other craving your brain produces. Inside your brain there is a small region that makes a chemical called dopamine. Dopamine is your brain’s “this is worth wanting” chemical, the reason you reach for one more bite of pasta, refresh your inbox one more time, or pick up your phone every few minutes. GLP-1 drugs reach that region and turn the dopamine down. The right dose dampens the loudest craving first: food. Take too much, and the volume drops on everything else, sex, exercise, work, even the urge to get out of bed in the morning. Anhedonia is the medical name for not feeling pleasure from anything at all. It looks identical to deep depression. The good news is that anhedonia from GLP-1s has an off switch: once the drug clears your system, the wanting comes back. The FDA has logged over 1,150 reports of bad reactions tied to compounded GLP-1s through July 2025. These are custom-mixed versions made by smaller pharmacies. In many of those cases, patients accidentally took five to twenty times their prescribed dose. The cause is usually confusion between milliliters and units when measuring out a dose with an insulin syringe, since compounded versions come in plain vials instead of the pre-filled pens that brand-name Ozempic uses. About 15 million Americans currently use a GLP-1, roughly one in eight adults. Around 75% of them eventually quit. Cost and side effects are the top reasons. A growing number describe a third reason that patients call “the lights dimming,” a flat, gray feeling across the whole day that doctors now recognize as anhedonia caused by the drug itself. This same mechanism has caught pharma’s attention. Eli Lilly is now running two large clinical trials with a combined 2,200 patients to see if a GLP-1 drug can treat alcohol addiction. The bet is that the same brain switch that turns off cravings for food can also turn off cravings for alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, and gambling. A 2026 psychiatry review put it bluntly: doctors should be treating these as psychiatric drugs, because that is what they have turned out to be. The drug works by quieting your brain’s signal that something is worth wanting. A normal dose turns the volume down on food cravings. Push the dose too high, and everything else goes quiet too.

Running has to be the worst sport out of all: > not fun at all > destroys joints > no meaningful goal > extremely stressful > makes you low T > ages you fast > gives you skinny fat physique > inefficent to lose weight

Cancer costs so far (prior to any treatment) - Inconclusive needle biopsy - $25k - Surgical biopsy - $100k - 10 min appt with oncologist - $4k