Frank Costanza (R), the character on the TV show Seinfeld played by the late Jerry Stiller, helped … [+]
It’s December 23. Time once again to celebrate Festivus. Festivus is that unofficial secular holiday that originated in the 1960’s but was really popularized by the TV character Frank Costanza. On one of the episodes of the sitcom Seinfeld. Costanza indicated that each Festivus holiday included the airing of grievances. And as has been done in 2022 and previous years, why not use this occasion once again to air some major ongoing health and public health-related grievances, because frankly many people have got a lot of problems with the year 2023. So without further adieu, here are 10 grievances to consider:
10. Claims that Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and other GLP-1 receptor agonists are the cure to the obesity epidemic.
Yes, glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro have shown impressive weight-loss results. Yes, they add significantly to the possibilities for people who have been struggling with obesity. But they are not the magic bullets against the obesity epidemic. Evidence suggests that you may regain whatever weight you lost once you stop taking these injectable medications. And it remains to be seen what their efficacy and safety profiles look like over the long-term. With 22 states in the U.S. currently having an adult obesity prevalence of 35% or higher, the obesity epidemic remains a growing public health crisis.
9. Medication contamination and safety concerns.
Have you noticed the number of medication contamination warnings over the past year, including the eye-popping U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warning about how many different brands of eye drops may have been contaminated with dangerous bacteria that I covered for Forbes in November? With many pharmaceutical companies increasingly using manufacturing plants in other countries and the FDA stretched in terms of person-power and resources, one has to wonder how well-monitored and regulated manufacturing practices and supply chains are these days.
8. Failure to adequately address long Covid.
Data from the National Health Interview Survey has shown that in 2022 6.9% of adults had suffered from long Covid at some point. That’s over one in 20 adults, which is by no means insignificant. That number will likely continue to increase as the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) keeps spreading. So, the big question is what is the national plan on how our country is going to deal with growing disease burden?
7. Failure to fully address physician, nurse and other health care professional burnout.
Remember all those long, overtime hours that healthcare professionals were working in 2020? And in 2021? And 2022 and 2023? Oh, and before 2020? The October 2023 issue of the CDC’s Vital Signs indicated that “More than double the number of health workers reported harassment at work in 2022 than in 2018”, “Nearly half of health workers reported often feeling burned out in 2022, up from 32% in 2018” and “Nearly half of health workers intended to look for a new job in 2022, up from 33% in 2018.” Yet, have the medical profession, hospital administrators and other executives really done enough to address problems? How about “No” in the words of Doctor Evil from the Austin Powers movies?
6. The lack of action about rising gun violence
Speaking about not doing enough to deal with an ongoing problem, gun violence in the U.S. keeps happening and happening and happening, despite all those, you know, “hopes and prayers.” Data from the Gun Violence Archive shows that at least 41,932 people, which would amount to over 117 gun-related deaths each day.
5. Lack of adequate action on climate change.
Want something else that people aren’t addressing adequately? Here’s something hot off the presses: 2023 will end up being the hottest year on record with the world’s average temperature for the first 11 months of the year topping 15°C (59°F). With global temperatures trending upwards over the past decade and businesses continuing to dump carbon and other pollution into the air, don’t expect this record to hold for too long.
4. The lack of urgency in dealing with declining mental health.
If you have been dealing with feelings of loneliness and other mental health challenges, you are not alone. In May of 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, MD, MPH released a report entitled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation” that equated the health effects of loneliness to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, as I for Forbes previously.
3. Potential misuse of artificial intelligence (AI).
Artificial intelligence (AI) could transform health and healthcare in a super positive way if done in the appropriate manner. At the same time, it could be destructive if not used appropriately. One potential example of the latter is what happened in April 2023, after JAMA Internal Medicine published an AI study. That study led to headlines like “ChatGPT Rated as Better Than Real Doctors for Empathy, Advice.” Sure, many doctors these days may not have the time or inclination to be fully empathetic when they are being put on a treadmill of having to see patients every 15 minutes. But the solution is not to replace doctors, nurses and other health care professionals with AI.
2. People pretending that Covid-19 is no longer a major threat.
Yeah, Covid is not over.
1. The continuing spread of the anti-science movement, misinformation and disinformation.
In his book The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist’s Warning, Peter J. Hotez, MD, PhD, Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine, warned about how anti-science and the spread of misinformation and disinformation has been killing people and could usher in new authoritarian regimes such as what happened in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, when leading scientists and academics got imprisoned. This year saw the “pausing” of an National Institutes of Health (NIH) initiative to study health communications that could have helped combat misinformation and disinformation. And as Darius Tahir described for the Los Angeles Times, one might wonder what role politicians may have played in quashing this initiative.
A couple more grievances. As was the case last year, 10 slots just ain’t enough room to cover all of the health-related grievances from 2023. The list above desnn’t even include continuing major problems such as antimicrobial resistant organisms like super gonorrhea—which certainly isn’t super—, racism, sexism and a lot of other -isms and those ridiculously small microbags that people are carrying around. Another grievance is that some of the grievances from last year’s list have remained on this year’s list. Will our society end up demonstrating some feats of strength—which is another Costanza Festivus tradition—in 2024 and actually address these problems. Or will they simply remain to complain about during next year’s Festivus?
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