An alternate way to view the same situation is that the regulatory state being slow and bureaucratic is the cause of those ills. The more you over-regulate and make the official pathways too expensive by adding a million tiny costs, the less unreasonable it seems to abandon the official channel entirely.

I agreee with the caution. I am not endocrinologist enough to guess what may happen and when. Because of the level of variably in all that is being experimented with, my guess is there may be a slower burn rather than explosion of odd toxicities. It does feel like stuff will happen.

I'm partial to the idea that we should think of these people as heroic. No way in hell I'd ever do anything like this, but people choosing to do this to their own bodies and essentially absorbing all of the risk is arguably valuable.

Certainly more important than other definitely dangerous activities like wingsuits and motorcycles.

Will side effects for hormonal and gene therapy approaches be shaken out in just 3-5 years? For gene therapy, the rare blood cancers associated with car-t or bluebirdbio suggest maybe not. Maybe they remain rare, but as scale and flexibility of use increases, how that may evolve. Hormones are a whole different calculation. With the creative and dosing, combinations, and applications I’m not sure how many from conclusions will be available. I’m not judging good/bad here, I’m just thinking that this “democratization” of medicines (maybe otherwise not available to some) will increase access, with both risks and benefits.

> all the side effects will be known

I wish there were some good that came out of this. But these are completely unusable results. It's uncontrolled and not being studied.

Did their testicles fall off because of LLM drug 32, drug 34, drug 2, or a combination of all the drugs they took at the same time? Or maybe it's a combination of their genetic makeup and drug 4.

It'd be like trying to glean any useful medical information from any drug addict. Was the heart attack caused by meth, huffing paint, or one too many cheese burgers? Who knows.

You know there are regulated labs you can send samples to and serious sellers (like the one I use) attach a testing certificate you can authenticate with the lab. So you know for sure what is it you're getting and what purity etc.

On the actual efficacy and safety fair point. But we're all adults here (I hope). And as for "society's consequences" other people mention most of these compounds are taken is such tiny amounts it is very unlikely they are harmful once they have been out for a couple of years and people have been taking them(for example 250ug every second day for bpc-157 my favourite compound that is proven by research to improve necrotic wound healing in mice and significantly improve injury recovery in my personal experience).

As for modification of hormonal pathways. Retatrutide is in a middle of human trials. There is no indication so far it is harmful. Personally I've not taken it (despite my doc literally pitching ozempic to me a month ago, my bmi is 31 and I never seriously tried to diet in my life - I decided to try "the natural way" first - to be fair the doc was also interested in the improvement in the glucose metabolism not just weight loss in my case). But I might in next 6 months if I don't get the results I want.

Weirdly enough, i know a guy who's worth half a billion bucks and he's doing exactly that.

Seemed they were ingesting more than just weight loss drugs.

I propose to delete this article from hackernews

Maybe I’ve been gone from SF for too long but this just sounds like a cult. With a LLM generated pitch

Oh don’t get me started. I have a friend who jumped on that scene…

Well, six years after he bought it the bike’s frame cracked in half as he was parking it. Somehow he avoided that happening in traffic.

Maybe worth its own post since this one got flagged. It’s well written albeit scary.

[one day, she accidentally doubled her dose. “My hair started falling out after a month because I was malnourished,” Ms. Bowman said. “It made my heart rate go up 10 beats per minute at night.” Still, she plans to keep going.]