In a quiet but eyebrow-raising pilot program, Utah is allowing artificial intelligence to renew certain prescription medications, with no human sign-off involved or required.

We’re probably all thinking the same thing, right? Images of bots casually handing out Adderall and opioids like they’re candy, but rest assured, the program is limited to 190 commonly prescribed medications. Pain management drugs, ADHD meds, and injectables are explicitly off the table.

Supporters frame the move as a practical fix for rising health care costs, clinician shortages, and missed refills, especially in rural areas where access is already thin.

Critics, including physician groups, raise concerns about safety, misuse, and what it means to insert an algorithm into one of medicine’s most fundamental relationships.

With the FDA mostly watching from the sidelines (they’ve been busy flipping the food pyramid), Utah is effectively running a live experiment and surfacing some big questions: how comfortable are we letting machines handle routine care, and who decides where the guardrails go?

Source: Politico

I am back to raging, this time about Ozempic, Wegovy and every other semaglutide out there. Not the medicine itself – there are people for whom GLP-1 drugs are clinically appropriate and genuinely life-changing (my own friends included). I’m raging at the glamour culture that’s grown up around them. The casual “skinny jab” chat. The “what are you on?” conversations that sound more like people comparing mascaras than talking about a potent drug that alters appetite and metabolism.

Young people are watching this. They’re clocking adults treating a serious medication like a lifestyle accessory, and then somehow we’re surprised when generational relationships with food and bodies become even more fraught. What has particularly sent me over the edge this week is the wave of life coaches promising they can “help you get off Ozempic” and “step down safely” through mindset and motivation. As if coaching can legitimately challenge the scientific impact of chemicals acting on a biological system. I’m over here shouting, “Stop bloody selling the idea that one can affirm their way out of pharmacodynamics or journal their pancreas into behaving differently!”

And then I’m raging again at unregulated provisions of “therapy” more broadly. The softly lit Instagrams, the vague references to “trauma-informed coaching,” the complete absence of clinical training, supervision, or accountability. These offers don’t land in a vacuum. They land in the laps of the very same people I’m working with – already navigating eating disorders. I cannot tell you how grateful I was for my Frolleague (friend + colleague for those who missed that issue) who pinged me a Tea & Teams (I drink a LOT of tea, with Soy Milk before you ask) aka an open invite for Marianne to explode on the screen with “FFS what the actual F’ing F is F’ing happening today.”

I have found solace this week in memories of my community litter pick in my council ward at the weekend: Three young lads stopped their football game, wandered over and asked if they could join in. They stayed for an hour, filling bags, rinsing me for my grabbing technique, and quietly taking pride in cleaning their own play area. It was glorious. Frankly, a bag of rubbish and three teenagers with grabbers felt more hopeful than anything else I’ve seen this week.

We’ve featured the amazing nonprofit Therapist Resource Network before for their commitment to supporting therapists going through difficult times, offering financial scholarships to help ease some of the strain.

Now, we’re excited to share another way they’re showing up for clinicians: free workshops every month to give therapists space to step back from overwhelm and reconnect with more sustainable ways of working.

Workshop Details

Sustainable Clinical Practice: Combating Compassion Fatigue
🗓 Date: January 30
⏰ Time: 8:30 AM PST / 11:30 AM EST
⏱ Length: 60 minutes

This inaugural workshop will be led by Natasha D’Arcangelo, QS, LMHC, LPC (she/her). Natasha is a Compassion Fatigue Specialist, Chief Clinical Officer at LBee Health, Therapist Brief reader, and all-around baddie. The session will cover what compassion fatigue looks like, how to recognize and measure it, and how to begin building a sustainability plan to manage it.

👉 Register here

The first year of the Trump presidency has been rough for many therapists, and weeks like this last one tend to land especially hard.

For many therapists, current events don’t just feel abstract or political; they are very personal. Watching policies, rhetoric, and enforcement actions that directly target who you are, the communities you belong to, or the people you love can create a constant background hum of vigilance, grief, fear, anger, and exhaustion all layered underneath daily life and clinical work.

For other therapists, this can reactivate old fault lines, especially when our core values clash with the systems or beliefs of the families we came from. That tension can carry grief, anger, and fatigue, and sometimes flip us into a more activated or regressed state.

This week, the tool is simple: acknowledgment. Not fixing. Not reframing. Just noticing what is stirring up for you and offering yourself the same steadiness and care you’d extend to a client.

Community tending can help. Rest can help. Stepping back from social media can help. Do more of the things that help.

This week, GLP-1 weight-loss drugs (Ozempic/Wegovy; Mounjaro/Zepbound) are back in the feed — not because the science suddenly changed, but because access is widening (including oral Wegovy in the US), the “transformation” economy keeps monetising bodies, and the market treats obesity meds like the next mega-franchise. Reuters

Here’s the stance we think holds: these drugs can be genuinely life-protective in obesity with comorbid risk, and they can also become clinically destabilising in eating-disorder terrain and thin-ideal culture. Both can be true in the same clinic, in the same week. New England Journal of Medicine

They’re not “vanity meds” for many patients.
In a large cardiovascular outcomes trial, semaglutide 2.4mg reduced major adverse cardiovascular events in people with overweight/obesity and established cardiovascular disease (without diabetes). That’s a “hard outcomes” signal, not just a cosmetic one. PubMed

But the long game is still the missing chapter.
We have solid medium-term trial data showing substantial weight loss while on treatment. The sharper issue is what happens after: STEP 1 (a key semaglutide weight-loss trial programme study) has extension data showing people regained a large proportion of lost weight within a year of stopping semaglutide. PubMed
And a 2026 BMJ analysis (reported widely this week) found that, on average, people regained weight relatively quickly after discontinuing weight-loss medications—often returning toward baseline within ~2 years, with particularly rapid regain in GLP-1 users. BMJ
Translation: These are chronic-condition drugs in a world that keeps framing them as short courses. Reuters

Tirzepatide is powerful — but “powerful” isn’t the same as “settled.”
Tirzepatide (Mounjaro/Zepbound) is a dual incretin agonist (it targets both GLP-1 and GIP pathways) used for type 2 diabetes and, in some settings, obesity/weight management.

In SURMOUNT-1 (the flagship tirzepatide weight-loss trial in adults with obesity/overweight without diabetes), participants saw large, sustained losses at 72 weeks.

We’re still early in understanding multi-year trajectories at population scale, especially across different psychological profiles. New England Journal of Medicine

If you work in ED services, you don’t need a lecture on why appetite suppression can become “relief.” You need a clean clinical lens:

The UK regulator has explicitly linked GLP-1 shortages to increased demand for licensed and off-label use, and has discouraged off-label prescribing for obesity during supply constraints. BMJ
Meanwhile, the market is twitchy: Novo Nordisk lost huge market value when next-gen trial results disappointed investors—because bodies aren’t just patients here; they’re also revenue projections. Reuters
Add in influencer/telehealth marketing and social media reframing (“quick-fix lifestyle enhancer”), and we’ve built a pipeline from insecurity → prescription → content → profit. Reuters

If you need something genuinely funny but still meaningful, Derry Girls is it. Set in 1990s Northern Ireland, the show follows a group of teenagers whose everyday dramas (e.g., school, crushes, family chaos) unfold against a backdrop of political unrest and a great soundtrack (especially if you love The Cranberries and The Corrs), handled with sharp writing, hilarious (sometimes over-the-top) performances, and zero sentimentality.

It’s fast, irreverent, and tender. A necessary reminder that humor can coexist with heaviness without minimizing it. Highly recommended for nights when your brain needs a break but your standards are still high.

I’m not sure if you can catch this outside the UK, which is a shame, because it is gritty, dark British humour at its best. From the outset, there are strong themes of suicide and alcoholism, so this is very much a “proceed with care” recommendation.

A group of menopausal women forming a rock band, and it is so bloody good — sharp, rude, funny- and some of the best acting talent we have to offer.

If you’re up for something brilliant but real, this is one to seek out.

Last week, we asked how you feel about New Year’s resolutions, and the responses were fairly spread out. No overwhelming consensus, just a range of approaches.

It turns out there’s more than one way to approach goals, and no strong evidence that January needs to be in charge of any of them.

“Making changes in life has no timeline!”