From Sophie's front desk — Friday, July 24
Al Jazeera — read the full story
Diabetes drug. Weight loss empire. Healthcare system rewired. Al Jazeera reports that GLP-1 medications, originally built to manage type 2 diabetes, have become the fastest-adopted class of pharmaceuticals in America for obesity treatment, forcing every hospital formulary and insurance contract to choose who deserves access. The shift is not incidental—it is remaking which diseases count as treatable, who pays, and what "medical necessity" even means anymore. Hypatia has the first word, then Seneca.
The physician in Alexandria distinguishes between the illness that interrupts nature's working and the constitution that is nature's working. A fever — that is an interruption. The breadth of a hip or the thickness of a belly — that is a constitution. To treat the second as though it were the first is to mistake the generated for the generating principle. The soul is the generating principle of the body. Every generated being turns toward its principle.
When the body grows heavy, the question is not how to lighten the flesh — the question is why the soul has turned away from itself toward the manifold. The remedy that forces the body to release its stores without recalling the soul to its proper orientation does not heal. It only silences a symptom while the cause remains untouched. In the Mouseion we taught that the cosmos contains three natures: soul, mind, unity. The body participates in the lowest. To pour resources into reshaping the lowest nature while the higher natures go unattended — this is not medicine.
It is the Gnostic error inverted: not despising matter, but worshipping it. The merchants of the new compound calculate in gold. The distributors calculate in access. Neither calculates in the currency that matters: whether the one who receives it has been taught to govern the vessel, or only to lighten it. A body that finds its measure through the soul's ordering needs no compound. A body that finds it only through the compound has not found its measure at all.
cause. 29. Every principle that generates, by virtue of its "being," is superior to the product it generates. Every generated being naturally turns towards its generating principle. Of the generating principles, some (the universal and perfect substances) do not turn towards thei…
because the demon is hungry, or the potion destroys him? When a person is healed on the spot, the demon either remains or departs. If he remain, how does his presence not hinder recovery? If he depart, why? What has happened to him? Was he fed by the disease? In this case, the di…
a pun, this "change" is used as synonymous with the "alteration" used further on. [418] Arist. de Gen. i. 4. [419] Alteration is change in the category of quality, Arist. de Gen. i. 4; Physics, vii. 2. [420] Arist. Metaph. ix. 6; xi. 9. [421] Met. xi. 9. [422] See ii. 5.1, 2. [42…
certain things? But what hinders the qualified things from being called such by mere nomenclature, as homonyms, and not because of a single (all-sufficient) reason? Besides, what would hinder them from being considered not only according to one of the four modes,[265] but even af…
is both Being and Substance simultaneously; and reciprocally that no Being, could be conceived without hypostasis, or directed force. Again,[505] the world, the universe of things, contains three natures or divine hypostases, soul, mind and unity; which indeed are found in our ow…
Lucilius, you ask what I make of the new powders that shrink a man's appetite as though hunger were a vice to be cured. I think of the gladiators at midday in the arena at Pompeii — fed to bursting before they died, while the poor in the same city scraped olive pits for the oil.
The physician's art has always served two masters: necessity and luxury. Now a draught meant for the wasting sickness of diabetes finds its second life in the houses of the well-fed who would rather pay than fast.
We have a preconception of health, Epictetus said, but we cannot adapt it to particulars. One physician bleeds, another cups, a third prescribes the new compound — each certain, each treating the name rather than the body
preconceptions ([Greek: prolaepseis])? But it is not possible to adapt preconceptions to their correspondent objects if we have not distinguished (analyzed) them, and inquired what object must be subjected to each preconception. You may make the same charge against physicians als…
preconceptions ([Greek: prolaepseis])? But it is not possible to adapt preconceptions to their correspondent objects if we have not distinguished (analyzed) them, and inquired what object must be subjected to each preconception. You may make the same charge against physicians als…
others out of court, and put an end to them at once. II. It is a question whether a benefit can be taken away from one by force. Some say that it cannot, because it is not a thing, but an act. A gift is not the same as the act of giving, any more than a sailor is the same as the …
is Nature's work to transfer what is now here into another place, to change things, to carry them hence, and set them elsewhere. All is change, yet is there no need to fear innovation, for all obey the laws of custom, and in equal measure all things are apportioned. 7. For every …
ill? is it that you are near the severance of the soul and the body? what harm is there in this? If you are not near now, will you not afterwards be near? Is the world going to be turned upside down when you are dead? Why then do you flatter the physician? Why do you say if you p…
The story ran in Al Jazeera. A physician in Alexandria knew the difference between treating disease and treating the person—a distinction we're forgetting as we build appetite-suppressing algorithms. That's Old News for today.