Exercise in a Pill

It's a pleasure to be back for another guest stint at Prawfs.  I bring to your attention an article in last week's NYT.  It describes recently published research on drugs that seem to mimic or augment the beneficial effects of exercise with little or no actual exercise required:

Researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego reported that they had found two drugs that did wonders for the athletic endurance of couch potato mice. One drug, known as Aicar, increased the mice’s endurance on a treadmill by 44 percent after just four weeks of treatment.

A second drug, GW1516, supercharged the mice to a 75 percent increase in endurance but had to be combined with exercise to have any effect.

If such drugs are safe and effective in humans, they hold out the promise that we may be able to get the positive health effects of exercise without much exercise.  Millions of people who go to the gym every morning could instead spend their limited time doing something else.  Yet, one detects from the article a hesitation to embrace that possibility.  People seem much more eager to play up the possibility that the drug will "help people who are too frail to exercise and those with health problems like diabetes that are improved with exercise." 

There are probably many reasons for this.  For example, researchers may focus on drugs that treat the sorts of medical conditions for which the FDA is likely to grant approval.  Similarly, perhaps it is easier (ironically) to get research grants to treat specific medical diseases rather than conditions that affect the entire population of healthy people.  I suspect though, that there is a general discomfort in supporting drugs that are meant to enhance human performance rather than serve as a therapy for some disorder.  Aside from concerns about safety, though, it's hard to see why.  People seem to take too seriously the adage, "No pain, no gain."  Sure, if you like the positive psychological effects of actual exercise, go ahead and exercise.  But if you don't, feel free to embrace the possibility that, some day in the still distant future, you won't have to.