To think weight-loss injections should be prescribed in person only. The scale of abuse must be shocking.

[Thisisdrugabuse]

Hear me out here. I have had 5 friends in their 30s and 40s tell me they're using weight-loss injections from online sources. Fine. Except one is a size 8 and another a size 10. Oh, it's so easy to get, just upload a photo of a day you looked chubbier a few years ago and change your height/ weight a bit. Out of my friends that recently told me they're taking it, the size 8 is on the highest dose. She looks ill. Only 1 is over a size 14 I'd say.

Am I being unreasonable

No-to think these medicines are not licensed for normal sized people. They might be at risk of osteoporosis, liver problems and who knows what else. It all seems dangerous and completely unregulated.

Yes- jog on op. These are important medicines helping lots of people and if people lie, that's their issue.

I have taken the WLJ but sadly I had a bad reaction. I ended up in A and E. I have gallbladder stones and I didn't know. You can't take the drugs with this condition.
I had been dieting for two years and had lost a significant amount of weight. I was on the list for wls as I started at BMI 43. My surgeon told me that I was no longer heavy enough for surgery and many people who went abroad for surgery were now using the drugs instead. They are safer so I agree with that. I've seen some nasty surgery in my profession.
When I started on the injections I had numerous friends ask how to get them. They're not obese. However I've also known very obese people be denied them as they don't meet the other criteria for the NHS.
We're rural so we don't have many glammy ladies. They spend their money on horses!
I have just been told a friend I booked for breakfast next week is no longer eating. That's bizzare to me. It will be interesting to see if she's on the jabs. I don't judge @Thisisdrugabuse but if you're worried about your friends say something. If they are addicted like a previous poster said you'd say something? I was alcohol dependant and a very good friend helped me give up. I always like the preface ' tell me to bog off but....'

@Thisisdrugabuse

As a clinician do you think about the issues holistically around the prescribing of these medications? Because it doesn't sound like you have.

Requiring f2f prescribing is the obvious safeguard everyone jumps to, but it also creates significant barriers, the added logistics and cost burden risks excluding the very people who need the help the most.

Misuse is obviously a concern, but careful evidence based safeguards can be built around online prescribing without making it so restrictive it hurts genuine patients.

It is a tricky balance, of misuse vs under treatment and inequality. That is what the GPhC is trying to find and enforce.

Thinking f2f is the only answer is not considering the full complexity of the issue or the real life consequence to patients.

I don't think the OP is saying no one should have them. I really wish I could get mine from my GP. I would happily pay what I'm paying to a pharmacy for them (I'm now on 15mg so it's not cheap). At least if you have to go to your own GP there's no concealment opportunity of using a third party ID to get them, or of doctoring photos so you look bigger than you are.

I think it should be illegal for these to be sold by aestheticians, although it seems to be by word of mouth rather than advertising. They're drug dealers, nothing more and nothing less.

I am about to start Mounjaro in August but although overweight, it is being prescribed by my GP for my diabetes to help control my levels rather than for weight loss reasons and I will have one of my medications swapped out for the injectable.
I have had to wait 2 years to get it as was previously on another one but NHS struggled to then get stocks of it due to everyone obtaining it privately and diabetics who were on it had their prescriptions stopped.
I will be regularly monitored while on it by my GP and it will be on NHS prescription and they will only be prescribing it to diabetics at my surgery not for those wanting to loose weight.

I think YABU, it's not really for you to judge whether someone would benefit from a medication that's been prescribed to them.

I was gaining and gaining, went from BMI 21 to 26 and just couldn't stop eating and bingeing. I tried losing weight the usual way which had always worked for me in the past but wasn't working now I'm approaching my forties. I went on the jabs and it's been life changing. It would have been much worse for my health to deliberately push myself into obesity just to qualify the 'proper' way. I truly believe in the not too distant future they'll be available to normal sized people to manage appetite and weight, not just to obese people to lose weight. They're a fantastic tool and one I'm extremely thankful for.

But they are. All you have to do is get a friend who fits the criteria to buy in their name and hand them over to you. I know someone who's doing exactly that. She's also getting a prescription for herself from a second online pharmacy. There are no checks that show if someone is buying from more than one place - it's only if the GP is informed that it might be noticed.

I do work within a minority community and abuse of these injections is rife. Women with a perfectly normal BMI use them to keep calorific intake very low, and anecdotally the young women have really high mortality rates and I've heard talk of them believing the injections being the cause.

It’s people like your friend that make a legitimate drug for obese people even harder to access.

im on it and its life changing. I can see the temptation.

For the husband - his wife is clearly in the grip of an eating disorder. I’d be telling her GP and also contacting the pharmacy to say she is abusing it.

How did you get them if you don’t mind me asking? Did you lie to the pharmacy??

I agree they are life changing but the more non-eligible people do this, the harder it will be for those who are eligible to access them.

In my experience it's photos with you holding up a piece of paper with that day's date on. Not infallible, but it's not a case of someone posting old photos from when they looked a bit fat on holiday five years ago. And most are requiring videos now.

Any private prescription or pharmacy medicine available online requiring a consultation requires honesty from the user, and quite rightly we have an individual responsibility when we provide that information. Sometimes the benefits of something being widely available outweigh the potential for harm when it falls into the wrong hands. Sometimes things get adjusted for good reason, like the amount of painkillers you can buy in one go.

I don't don't buy all the posters clutching their pearls and fanning themselves with faux concern about WLI when this site affects such fat phobes.

Someone up thread has mentioned that an aesthetic nurse practitioner is using phials of peptides to inject clients. I have been targeted with these adverts for the phials, which are definitely dodgy. I think it's these that are the problem, not the legit pharmacies which now have stringent guidelines. When I've delved further into where these phials come from it's well dodgy, companies based in African countries and the like, the contents could well be a semaglutide used for research, equally it could be insulin or some other dangerous content.
This is the problem with ' nurse practitioners' turning rogue, making lots of money from stupid people, my husband's ex being one of them, she herself was bulimic and now is involved in the aesthetic bandwagon. Its this that should be more regulated.

@spoonbillstretford hi there, over the last few months some of the posters on the August thread have been asked to go through a more rigorous process that involves a live a video with your pharmacy, photographic ID, and having to stand in a doorway with a tape measure to show your height, and if I recall correctly they had to show their weight on the scales also. No one has seemed to mind doing it because I guess if you have nothing to hide why would you bother about it. Oh and there’s something about the way it’s done that you can’t see them but they can see you. Or is it the opposite? I can’t remember.

Hi there @SquishyGloopyBum, I’ve been thinking about what you and a few posters have said about things becoming harder for eligible patients to get the injections - but how much harder would harder be? Would it be the formality people have to go through, or would it be a whole new qualifying criteria altogether?

*agree they are life changing but the more non-eligible people do this, the harder it will be for those who are eligible to access them.

I guess it wouldnt exactly be hard to take a pic of someone else and lie about who you really are to these online prescribers, if i could afford it i would give it a go and my hubby too i bet (saying that he would begrudge the price for himself alot!!) But i am size 16-18 and hubby is 21st and like triple XL or something, so we kinda need it.
They should make the rules stricter, but i guess that wont happen until a few skinny people have died from malnutrition 😫.
I wonder how truly safe they are tbh.

@Liss19 many places now ask you to upload ID and expect that to match the payment details, and the photos or video that you upload.

You and your husband likely both qualify though, so no need to lie. Work out your BMIs and if over 30 then you’d definitely meet the criteria.

No prescription medication is guaranteed safe. But WLI are judged to be safe enough that the benefits very much outweigh the risks for those that qualify.

I agree OP I think it’ll be the next big scandal in a few years and makes me think of vaping, vaping should never have been allowed to be sold by shops only healthcare professionals as part of stopping smoking and I feel similarly about weight loss injections

i know several people on them who really didn’t need them so unsure how they’ve got them but they’re getting them from somewhere

i could do with shifting a few stones, I eat too much crap and know I do but I’d rather get a personal trainer than pay the £150 a month for injections which I have no idea how they will affect me

they may have their place under strict criteria and should be given under controlled environment but not willy nilly and other things should be tried first, I work with someone who has been doing the NHS weight loss thing with the shakes and then gradually adding in meals with strict calories along side exercise and she has lost loads of weight so it can be done

i am with a nurse and wouldn’t touch them with a barge pole unless I was morbidly obese and had tried everything else

Yeah were both over that bmi 😐. Ide give it a go without if he tried them. We both need to do something. Trying to persuade him is the thing.
Its good that they are requiring photo ID now though, so they should, i can see there being stricter laws brought in at some point.

If that's true, my quote smacks if someone using the injections who probably shouldn't be and is scared they'll get find out.

OP sounds worried ,not jealous, is raising an important point about drug abuse I wasn't aware of, even as a Health Care Professional. And TBH sounds like a much better person than the writer of this quote, so jog on love.

There are community pages on Facebook for the injections and people are losing their hair, gallbladder issues and countless other things

This, he needs to contact them if its getting out of hand really.

An HCP who thinks that's how MHRA pick up population-level issues? 🤔

Yes but what you haven’t said is that those posters had BMIs of 29 and 29.5 so very very close to cut off and nothing like someone who isn’t overweight using it to use a stone. Definitely in the benefits outweighing risks category.

And how quickly have they lost weight?

Because many people are in this mindset that it’s better to loose a lot very quickly.
The Result is the same than when you do any crash diet (except this time it’s much easier so more people do it for longer). People loose muscle, hair, look ill etc…. Just like they did when they were doing the cabbage diet.

Im not saying that there isn’t any side effects that are specific to WLI, but most of the really negative stuff is that. This idea that it’s ok to loose 1~2kg or more a week fir weeks on end. That just loosing weight is the important part. Not replenishing the body, ensuring you have enough nutrients etc…. The whole diet industry memo applied to WLI.
I mean some adverts I’ve seen for exercise at home were proposing the loose 15kg in 3 weeks 😵‍💫😵‍💫. That’s crazy and unrealistic. But somehow people still aim for that 🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️

i could do with shifting a few stones, I eat too much crap and know I do but I’d rather get a personal trainer than pay the £150 a month for injections which I have no idea how they will affect me

@AlaskaThunderfuckHiiiiiiiii and yet the latest research (from a week ago or so) says that actually people in our western societies move plenty already and it’s our diet that is the issue.
So our focus shouldn’t be on more exercise. It should be on eating better.

but honestly, you can't always tell. I don't tell people my weight but I carry it well, dress well, and if we ever get into one of those conversations about trying to be "good" or whatever, I always get people saying I look great and they'd be genuinely surprised if I told them my weight which is (due to being v short) about 5 stone overweight. I am a size 14/16 , so according to some on here that's fine, normal, not a problem. But it is. I have been on MJ in a small 2.5 / 5mg dose since April and have lost just under 2st. Its just made it possible to eat the sub 1000 calories I need to to lose weight, as another pp said. But I would need to lose AT LEAST another 2 and probably 3 to get into a healthy BMI, but most people that know me wouldn't think I needed it and will probably tell me I look too thin or unhealthy if I get there. I think a lot of the negative posts don't appreciate that we have become REALLY bad at seeing what is normal, healthy, overweight etc and don't want to accept that as a society we have completely normalised being an unhealthy 2-3 stone overweight.