Dr Kimberly Chew, principal clinical psychologist at AO Psychology, which offers counselling and psychotherapy services, said that the human nervous system was never designed to process hundreds of curated and filtered images daily.<\/p>\n
“Celebrity and influencer transformations can distort people’s perception of what is normal, attainable or necessary, especially when these transformations are presented without context around genetics, editing, privilege or medical intervention.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
She also noted that medications such as GLP-1 can be clinically appropriate for some people, but in vulnerable populations, they may reinforce the belief that the body needs to be controlled or “fixed” to be acceptable.<\/p>\n
Both psychologists expressed concern that younger people may come to see pharmaceutical intervention as necessary to achieve an acceptable or ideal body.<\/p>\n
“Adolescence and young adulthood are already periods of heightened identity formation and social comparison,” Dr Chew said.<\/p>\n
“If the cultural narrative becomes ‘your body is only acceptable if medically modified’, we risk increasing body dissatisfaction, perfectionism and appearance-related anxiety in younger generations.”<\/p>\n
Such concerns, however, are only one way of looking at the Ozempic phenomenon.<\/p>\n
Assistant Professor George Wong, a sociologist at the Singapore Management University (SMU), said that he is less concerned about Ozempic, or GLP-1 drugs in general, than the systems governing how such drugs are developed, regulated and used.<\/p>\n
He acknowledged that unrealistic beauty standards can be harmful, but argued that people should be free to pursue their own appearance goals as long as they do not become obsessive or affect their daily functioning.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The more important question, he highlighted, is whether healthcare institutions, regulators and drugmakers can ensure medications such as GLP-1 remain safe and accessible to those who need them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dr Kimberly Chew, principal clinical psychologist at AO Psychology, which offers counselling and psychotherapy services, said that the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":717521,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[32642,49,48,2985,84,377,1058,1229,953],"class_list":["post-717520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-medication","tag-body-image","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-diabetes","tag-health","tag-medication","tag-medicine","tag-obesity","tag-weight-loss"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=717520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717520\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/717521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=717520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=717520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=717520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}