Hopefully they reduce the cost overall. As soon as people are taken off it, whether that be because they finished their trial or they get out priced, appetite shoots right back to what it was before and the weight comes back with it unless the person changed their habits.
This seems to be a great outcome if you're the drugmaker. You don't want your medicine to cure the patient, otherwise they'll stop buying it. I bet if they found an alternate drug that worked permanently after N doses, they'd bury it and never productize it.
As far as I know the pharmaceutical companies have not adopted a strategy of attempting to undermine or block surgical treatments, which you'd expect if their operating strategy was as you say.
Love a good conspiracy & not a biologist / chemist, but I don't thing such a drug is even possible in our current state of technology.
Treatments that are "one (or N) & done" tend to be surgical procedures which physical change your body or vaccines which train your immune system (which has a sort of viral memory bank).
Most other regular drug treatments are introducing chemicals into the body which your body consumes/breaks down/etc. The body is always self repairing, replacing cells, etc.
As a layperson, I conceptualize altering brain chemistry via a drug is a temporary thing the way adjusting your pools chemistry is. You have to constantly replenish with new chemicals as everything is constantly breaking down and changing.
