Who Deserves a GLP-1? with Dr. Janelle Duah

GLP-1 medications seemed to appear overnight: suddenly everywhere from physicians’ offices to TikTok feeds to dinner table conversations. But for obesity and lifestyle medicine specialist Dr. Janelle Duah, the story started long before the headlines. In the first episode of The Preprint, Dr. Neel Shah and Dr. Duah unpack what GLP-1s actually are, how they affect nearly every organ system in the body, and why the cultural conversation around these drugs reveals something much larger for women and families than weight loss. Together, they explore the growing tension between informed patients and skeptical physicians, the rise of direct-to-consumer medicine, and the uncomfortable reality that many of the patients who could benefit most from these medications still can’t access them. Dr. Duah also reflects on treating patients while living with PMOS herself, the stigma surrounding obesity medicine, and what it means when physicians react defensively to so-called “prepared patients.”  At its core, this episode asks a bigger question: when medicine changes faster than the healthcare system can adapt, who gets left behind?