Happy Festivus 2023: Here’s The Airing Of 10 Health Grievances

Frank Costanza (R), the character on the TV show Seinfeld played by the late Jerry Stiller, helped … [+] popularize Festivus, the unofficial secular holiday that includes the annual airing of grievances. (Photo by Margaret Norton/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images)

NBCUniversal via Getty Images

It’s December 23. Time once again to celebrate Festivus—you know that unofficial secular holiday that originated in the 1960’s and was popularized by the TV character Frank Costanza, played by the late actor Jerry Stiller.

On one of the Seinfeld episodes, Costanza indicated that each Festivus holiday would be punctuated by the airing of grievances followed by demonstrating some feats of strength. And as I have done in 2022 and previous years, why not use this occasion to once again to air some major ongoing health and public health-related grievances? After all, frankly, many health and public health experts have got a lot of problems with the year 2023. So without further adieu, here are 10 such grievances to consider while you are dancing round the Festivus Pole:

10. Claims that Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and other GLP-1 receptor agonists are the cure to the obesity epidemic.

Umm, no. Sure, glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro have shown impressive weight-loss results. Sure, these are now important additions to what doctors can use to help patients who have been struggling with obesity. But these medications are not 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 will 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 our medication supply is 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, which is what happens when not a whole lot is being done to stop its spread (see Grievance 2). So, the big question is what is the national plan on how our country is going to deal with this growing disease burden? The long and short of it is America is still waiting.

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 these burning 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 continuing to trend upwards 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 covered for Forbes earlier this year.

3. Potential misuse of artificial intelligence (AI).

AI could transform health and healthcare in a super positive way if done the right way but could be destructive if done in the wrong way. Case in point. In April 2023, a study published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine led to headlines like “ChatGPT Rated as Better Than Real Doctors for Empathy, Advice” that could kind of be misinterpreted. Umm, if anyone believes that hospital executives can simply replace doctors with lower cost AI, why stop there? Why not replace your significant other, your friends and, oh, all those hospital executives with AI as well?

2. Politicians, business leaders and people pretending that Covid-19 is no longer a major threat.

This week emergency department visits for Covid-19 have been up 6.6% from the prior week. Yeah, Covid is not over. #Covidisnotover.

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 published this year, 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 have 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.

What is our society doing to combat this threat? Well, this year saw the “pausing” of a 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 doesn’t even include major continuing problems such as antimicrobial resistant organisms like super gonorrhea—which certainly isn’t super—, racism, sexism, a lot of other -isms and those ridiculously small microbags that people are carrying around. Why even carry around a microbag?

Another grievance is about grievances. Some of the grievances from the 2022 list have remained on this year’s list, which suggests that our society hasn’t been taking many public health problems seriously enough. Will our society end up demonstrating some feats of strength in 2024 and actually address these problems. Or will they simply remain and get worse so that we can complain about them yet again during next year’s Festivus?