Rethinking addiction in the age of Ozempic

This message comes from Great Wolf Lodge. There's adventure for the whole family, including an indoor water park that's always 84 degrees, attractions, spacious suites, and more. You're just a short drive away from an unforgettable family getaway. Learn more at greatwolf.com. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're gonna find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Moderation is is is so important. There are so many things in life that we want a little of, maybe, quite a bit of, but not too much of. And, you know, Aristotle obviously had this insight many centuries ago. This is Dhruv Kullar. He is a physician at Weill Cornell Medical College, and he would love his patients to live by Aristotle's famous words. It is best to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken. But in the modern era Our world is kind of designed for too much these days. It's just inundated with content and food and desire and all sorts of things. For some people, just having access to all these earthly delights makes moderation impossible. Take a woman named Mary, for for example. I met Mary last year. She's a middle aged woman, and she has been struggling with alcohol addiction for decades. She told me that she started drinking when she was 18 years old, and soon after, she could drink something like 18 beers in the sitting and and barely even seem buzzed. And Mary tried all sorts of things to try to cut back on her drinking. She entered Alcoholics Anonymous. She used a medication called Antabuse. She tried alcohol rehab, but none of them were effective. And she struggled with alcohol, and it started to really take a toll on many aspects of her life. Then about a year ago, she was at a bar with a friend who usually also liked to drink a lot. But that evening, Mary noticed that her friend had barely touched her drink. And her friend told her that she started taking Ozempic, and now she could barely bring herself to drink more than two beers at a time. And Mary was really interested in this. She'd always thought of Ozempic as kind of a obesity medicine or a diabetes medicine, and she was wondering, you know, what what did it have to do with drinking? And as it happened, the next day, she saw this advertisement on Facebook that there was a clinical trial nearby that was studying whether Ozempic or semaglutide could help people with alcohol …