10mg Pen - No golden dose

[8books]

Just received my new 10mg MJ pen from Cloud Pharmacy (counting clicks for 7.5mg dose). It’s the bottom one in the photo…

It’s a new style pen with no golden dose!! 😭

Sharing here for awareness. I would have ordered 12.5mg if I’d known they’d introduced new style pens for 10mg!!

I received a 15mg pen from MedExpress yesterday and it was the new style, expiry Jan 28.

It does not have to be used within 4 weeks and me and dh have been doing it since Christmas as we got to target weight. The pens have a use by date which is usually a year or so from manufacture.

@ithinkilikethislittlelife you have misunderstood what the use by dates that are printed on the pens are for. That is the date that they can be kept, unused, in the fridge, before starting to use the pen. Once a pen is in use, the manufacturer instructions are to use within 30 days, regardless of whether they are stored in the fridge or not. It’s detailed in the paper information leaflet that comes with each pen.

@HRHCurmudgeon the locking mechanism doesn’t sit within the glass vial that the medication is in, so there is no risk of any debris getting into the medication.

I haven’t misunderstood. I am aware how to use it and I have been doing it this way for months and it’s still effective.

@ithinkilikethislittlelife I’m aware that’s how you’re using the pens. My point was about the usage instructions and the printed expiry date, which only applies to unused pens kept in the fridge. You may well find the pens to be effective, but the manufacturer has not got the evidence that this is the case and that the medication will remain safe for that duration once in use. Whether or not people choose to ignore the manufacturer instructions on usage depends on them understanding what they are correctly. Clarification of the instructions is always worthwhile.

It’s advised to use within 4 weeks of the first use in the user guide that comes with the pen

Advised.

That’s a shame. My last one from them was old style

Advised. It doesn’t explode on the 31st day.

It’s not advice. It’s an instruction. The instructions say “Dispose of the pen 30 days after first use.
Dispose of the pen after receiving 4 weekly doses.”

It doesn’t explode on day 31, the risks of using it 1 day past the usage instructions are likely to be very low, of course they are.

I’m just a tad sceptical of pharmaceutical companies, it’s in their benefit for us to use higher doses over shorter periods of time. There isn’t much incentive at this stage at least to do a lot of studies on microdosing and prolonging pens. It’s a litigious market I know, arse covering etc etc, but they’re also out to make profit. I’m not going to throw out 32 day old Mounjaro any more than I am paracetamol a bit out of date. We’ve all seen how companies heavy handedly encourage users to up their doses unscientifically.

I know they are tied to their studies and what the evidence shows, but there’s not a lot of incentive to do studies to show the longevity of stretching out doses.

Just coming back on to say my new 7.5mg delivered today from MMP is a new style pen. Expiry July 2027 so that’s one giveaway, and obviously the bigger plunger. But also the box is now slightly different, slimmer and it doesn’t have a cardboard insert inside like the old ones

I’m going to do this! How much do I extract for a 2.5mg dose please?

@Wellwellwell1 every Mounjaro pen, regardless of strength (2.5mg, 5mg, 7.5mg etc) is 0.6ml for a full dose, or 60 clicks (line markers on the pen barrel) when you turn the pen to the normal 1 position. So it's just some very simple maths to work out how many clicks you need to turn the pen to do a partial dose.

If you have a 5mg pen, and you want a 2.5mg dose from it, then 2.5mg is half of 5mg. So instead of turning the full 60 clicks to the 1 position, you only want half of them, so you'd turn the pen for 30 clicks. You can mark that point on the pen barrel with a marker pen so you don't have to count the next time.

The more general calculation to work out the clicks for any dose from any strength of pen is:

(dose you want in mg / strength of pen in mg) x 60

The reason that pharmacies supply additional pen needles is not because they expect you to partial dose, but because the instructions say to change the pen needle if the one you've attached doesn't prime properly. So you need a few spares.