If Your Child Or Ward Has Been Prescribed Weight Loss Drugs

If your child or ward has been prescribed diet drugs, in general, he/she should have first failed at dieting:

If he/she failed at dieting by following an expert's advice, it is most likely that he/she failed because the diet he/she was given was flawed.

Expert's diets are flawed in one main way - they are too extreme. So extreme, that no one can follow them.

There are several different ways in which expert diets achieve their extremeness.

To understand them, you have to look to the physiology and starvation literature and recognize that the diet literature is corrupt.

If you want to gain an understanding of the problem, read my ebooks: Why Diets Fail: The Simple Mistake That Ruins Millions Of Lives and MASSematics ^tm: How To Get Rich By Not Dieting. Both are available here.

Diet drugs have their own set of reasons why they should not have been prescribed:

1.    If he/she failed at dieting and the diet was provided to him/her by an expert, he/she had no choice but to fail since the diet was, in all probability, flawed.

This means that he/she did not have a real opportunity to avoid taking medication, since the diet he/she was given was destined to fail him/her.

His/her doctor should have first made sure that he/she was on a possible diet program, instead of an impossible one.

Since he/she was not given a real opportunity to lose weight by dieting, the drugs he/she was prescribed were not indicated.

Therefore, they should never have been prescribed.

2.    Because you were not aware that his/her diet virtually guaranteed he/she would require drugs, you could not provide an informed consent.

Treatment prescribed without an informed consent, except in instances where consent is impossible (e.g., coma following a car accident), is a breach of medical ethics and possibly negligence.

He/she may be able to recover damages if he/she has been the victim of medical negligence or medically unethical behavior.

3.    If he/she was not provided a diet to follow before he/she was medicated, it is possible that he/she should not have been medicated. Arguably medication would initially be indicated, but only in addition to dietary therapy, increased physical activity, and behavior therapy (i.e., lifestyle therapy) if he/she had certain complications from his/her overweight or was obese. However, if his/her doctor "let" him/her continue to gain weight until he/she needed diet drugs and did not warn you of the consequences of his/her weight gain or attempt to intervene earlier, then he/she may have been injured.

If your child or ward was on a diet first and failed, the following may have injured him/her:

• author
• endorser (expert who endorses another's weight loss program)
• publisher
• media outlet (promoting the book or weight loss program)
• media personality (touting the book or weight loss program)
• physician
• medical organization
• nutritionist
• dietitian
• medical center
• weight loss clinic
• commercial weight loss company
• pharmaceutical company
• trainer
• food company

If the diet:

• reduced his/her daily caloric intake by 500 - 1000 Calories per day or more
• advertised a 1 -2 pounds weight loss per week or more
• had him/her eating fewer Calories per day than his/her basal metabolic rate (BMR)
• claimed that to lose one pound per week he/she had to reduce his/her caloric intake by 500 Calories per day
• claimed that to lose two pounds per week he/she had to reduce his/her caloric intake by 1000 Calories per day
• reduced his/her daily caloric intake and advised him/her to exercise to burn 300 or more Calories per day
• reduced his/her caloric intake and informed him/her that he/she can add muscle by exercising
• claimed that one pound of muscle burns 35 or more Calories per day at rest
• had a food product associated with it (e.g., bars, supplements, meals)

If your child or ward was not on a diet or exercise program before being drugged, then he/she may have been injured.