The dirty little secret that many weight loss drug patients might not realize until they get on the Ozempic treadmill is that these drugs only work — to the extent they can be said to work at all despite all of the side effects and the poor-quality evidence — when taken in perpetuity.
As soon as the patient stops the drugs, the weight comes back in the vast majority of cases — plus, potentially, a lifetime supply of crippling side effects. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, as they say.
Related: Doctor Warns of ANOTHER 'Alarming' Side Effect of 'Miracle' Weight Loss Drug
Via Yahoo! News (emphasis added):
Millions of Americans who have dropped pounds and boosted their health using popular obesity drugs like Wegovy are facing a new dilemma: What happens if they stop taking them?
Many worry, rightly, that they’ll regain weight and revert to old habits. In clinical trials, patients who paused the drugs put back on most of the weight they lost.
But others are gambling on a do-it-yourself strategy to ease off the drugs and stay slim by stretching out doses, taking the medication intermittently or stopping and starting again only if needed.
“To me, it’s a help, it’s an aid,” said Donna Cooper, 62, of Front Royal, Virginia, who lost nearly 40 pounds in nine months using Wegovy along with diet and exercise. “At some point you have to come off of them. I don’t want to be on them forever.”
More than 3 million prescriptions for the new medications are dispensed each month in the U.S., according to recent data from the health technology company IQVIA. They include semaglutide, the drug in Ozempic and Wegovy, and tirzepatide, the drug in Mounjaro and Zepbound.
This is where Donna is at odds with the pharmaceutical industry. She may have signed up for a temporary therapy to get down to a healthy weight and then be done.
This is not an idea that the pharmaceutical and medical industries share. Their business model, in fact, depends on people like Donna being forced to take these drugs for a lifetime.
Continuing:
Doctors who treat obesity stress that the disease is a chronic condition that must be managed indefinitely, like heart disease or high blood pressure. The new injection drugs work by mimicking hormones in the gut and the brain to regulate appetite and feelings of fullness. They were designed — and tested — to be taken continuously, experts said.
“We are not an injection shop,” said Dr. Andres Acosta, an obesity researcher and medical adviser at the Mayo Clinic. “I don’t think they should be used in intermittent fashion. It’s not approved for that. They don’t work like that.”
In terms of weight loss, these drugs were not “designed and tested to be taken continuously.” That is a lie.
As I have documented previously at PJ Media, the study that originally allegedly justified FDA approval of semaglutide for weight loss had several limitations:
- It followed patients for 68 weeks with no follow-up to see what happened after.
- It failed to distinguish between fat loss and muscle loss (muscle loss being a major side effect of the drug). All of it was chalked up to “weight loss.”
- It did not assess long-term side effect risk.
- It paired semaglutide therapy with caloric restriction and exercise, so it’s impossible to say how much weight loss was due to the dieting and exercise compared to the semaglutide alone.
… And that’s how you rig a study to make the results say what you want them to say.
