This episode contains distressing themes, including suicide and disordered eating. For twenty four to seven support, please contact Lifeline on thirteen eleven fourteen. You'll find some links to more resources in today's episode description.
Welcome to the eighty second Golden Gloves, Ozempik's biggest night.
Shall we think of this ozembic takeover in Hollywood?
Excuse me, Jennie, No, he's of ozembic.
From viral weight loss drug to Hollywood punchline.
What percent?
Shouldn't be the only ones whose body fat is one percent?
When I look.
Around the room, I can't help but wonder is ozembic right for me?
Before ozempic took social media by storm, it was touted as the miracle drug that could end type two diabetes. Medications are changing the way that you think about diabetes and weight management, but also cardiovascular risk management. Once lauded as the silver bullet to the stars, Ozempic and other similar medications slowly but surely crossed into the mainstream, bringing with them new conversations about body image, ethics, health and accessibility.
There is so much demand. There is demand for this that outstrips anything we ever say.
But what does the exploding global popularity of azenpic mean for young.
People, the entire body neutrality movement has almost had this regression where it's like, I don't know, we're actually back to those sizes that we're trying to get away from, and here's a drug that's going to fix everything.
Over the next three episodes, we'll explore the new world of weight loss medication, its long term implications, the medical and social ramifications of its growing popularity, and how it's being prescribed and used in Australia Today.
Medicine and marketing should not be disconnected.
In this way, We'll.
Speak to experts, advocates and the people whose lives have been changed by ozempic, for better or for worse.
From the daily os.
I'm Emma Gillespie and this is investigating Ozempic Part one. Ozempic was first approved by health authorities in the US in twenty seventeen as a medication to treat type two diabetes, approved for use in Australia the following year. The drug now generates billions of dollars annually for its manufacturer, Novo Nordisk, which has become one of the world's richest pharmaceutical companies. But what is ozempic and how does it actually work.
So, Zempic's a drug name, and it's a drug name for what is otherwise known as semaglue tide. Semaglue tide falls into this family of drugs called glp ones.
That's doctor Michael Bonding.
He is the Australian Medical Association Chair of Public Health and Sydney GP.
Ozempic is the one that has been talked about so much in the media, but actually there are two others that get a lot of coverage as well. One is called weigov which is just a higher dose version of ozempic, and another one that is called Munjaro. They act on hormones in our body and generally they were developed for diabetes patients. What they did for them was making sure that the cells work better with insulin, but also then that gastric emptying is slowed down so you feel fuller faster.
You ended up with people losing significant amounts of weight, which for many people with diabetes is also a significant benefit to improving their diabetic control. But for those who don't have diabetes, that side effect has meant that these drugs have become increasingly popular for an indication that they weren't originally put on the market for.
With those Zampig's popularity for dramatic weight loss, it's been hard to get. But a new similar drug has the same active ingredient as ozempig.
Wheregovi helped people lose on average fifteen percent of their body weight, that's compared with the nearly twenty three percent achieved by Maunjaro. The battle of the weight loss drugs continues.
Taken as an injection, usually once a week, doctor Bonning says, ozempic and other GLP one medications start working almost immediately, within a few hours. For twenty six year old Grace, the overall experience of weight loss medication gave her a confidence that she had never felt before. Grace wrote to us from Brisbane to tell us about her experience. Here's a bit of her story, voiced by someone else.
My entire life, I have been slightly overweight since becoming an adult, working an office job, no longer doing sports, the weight started to climb slightly. It wasn't until I moved away from home and experienced a really rough time that I ended up putting on significant weight in a short period. This was the start of a number of health problems for me. I had kidney stones, I had gallstones. I was generally unhappy and lacking a lot of self love.
Grace has used both ozenpic and Munjaro at different times since June twenty twenty three.
Munjaro was significantly more expensive, but it gave me almost no side effects. Because of that, I was able to consistently stay on the medication for about six months.
She lost over seventeen kilos during that time, and since then, Grace says her life has changed. Her confidence has transformed. The joined pain she used to feel daily has disappeared.
I'm not embarrassed to walk up the stairs with someone. I feel confident that I could physically get myself out of danger if I had to. The mobility is insane. The change of perspective is enormous.
Grace said she feels in control of her food choices for the first time in her life. She details experiencing a shift in how she thinks about food, what Grace describes as previous compulsions and food noise all day, every day. She told us it's a difficult thing to explain to someone who's never experienced issues with food noise, but Grace likens it to listening to a loud song on repeat, and you've got no ability to change the song, or
turn down the volume or take a break. For her, both glp won medications, Ozempic and Munjaro.
Were like finally someone.
Had given her a remote to listen to something else.
It was so healing to know that I wasn't just worse than skinny people, or I wasn't just weak. My brain wasn't working against me anymore.
Grace's story is just one of the hundreds of positive anecdotes we received when we asked our audience about their experiences using Ozenpic and similar medications. Dozens of TDA followers told us that these drugs have changed their life, that they've never been happier or healthier. Some of you told us it's saved your life. We could go on for hours talking through all the many glowing reviews we received about Ozeenpic, Munjaro, and we go v.
But while so many of you.
Did have a positive experience with these medications, hundreds of you also told us the exact opposite. Several TDA followers told us they've ended up in hospital after taking ozenpic, with gallbladder removal being the most commonly reported issue.
As with most drugs, most side effects are dose dependent. They often are worse at higher doses.
We'll be back with more of today's episode right after this. Ultimately, GLP one medications like ozeenpic are still relatively new, and that means the full list of side effects associated with their long term use remains somewhat unknown. GPS and healthcare providers can report adverse side effects relating to these medications to the federal government's Department of Health. These reports are tracked on the Therapeutic Goods Administration's Database of Adverse Event Notifications.
The online tracker includes negative symptoms associated with the use of any medication, but you can filter down by type.
So that's what we did. To look at ozepic.
Wegov and compounded products or pharmacy made versions of these drugs, as well as semagluetide products where the brand name was not specified. Remembering that semaglutides are a type of GLP one. GLP ones are these weight loss medications that we are talking about. On the database, gastro Intestinal disorders, including pancreatitis, made up around half of the adverse events reported between
January twenty twenty three and January twenty twenty five. But there's another particularly sinister side effect associated with ozempic use that's becoming increasingly prominent. I, for no reason whatsoever, and I hadn't felt like this for a very long time, became suicidal unable to work.
It was really quite unexplained.
Mackenzie is a twenty six year old woman who sought out a zenpic for weight management.
I've tried diet exercise and haven't been able to get that to work for the long term.
But taking ozepic would lead her down one of the most frightening periods of her life.
I was really really concerned, and I chatted with my partner about it, and he was like, well, the only thing that has changed in your life is you going on this particular medication.
Suicidal ideation makes up one in every twenty adverse GLP one reactions reported to the TGA database. Since January twenty twenty three, there have been three reports of attempted suicide and separately, two deaths by suicide associated with the use of these medications. Ozepic was the only product suspected to
be related to both of those deaths. The TGA website stresses that the reports included in the database doesn't mean the details of the event have been confirmed or that the event has been determined to be related to that specific medication that it's listed alongside. The TGA says it uses adverse event reports to quote identify when a safety issue may be present, but it says assessing the safety of a medication cannot be made using the tracker alone.
Saw Juniper advertised and decided to go through the questionnaire that they've got online, put in all accurate information, and it gave me a prescription for ozenpic.
Juniper is one of a growing number of online platforms that privately prescribe weight loss medications without requiring face to face consults. It's a virtual or telehealth service, and while individual practitioners must comply with compulsory standards, there is no current mandatory safety and quality standards framework for these platforms. Mackenzie disclosed to but that she'd been taking antidepressants since her early teens before she received a prescription for ozenpic.
So I started receiving that in the mail and injecting that as per kind of the recommended guidelines. I kind of had peace of mind that it would cover everything that was in my medical history.
Mackenzie started on what she said was quite a low dose of ozempic, but a month later she ramped up to a higher dose, and that's when she says things started feeling off, essentially out of nowhere. She describes experiencing suicidal ideations. Mackenzie shared her concerns with her regular GP, but that GP is not the person who prescribed her this medication. She got the drugs through Juniper.
He said that he'd seen this in a number of patients. He explained to me how it kind of worked, and one of the things is that it slows the digestive system, which then can have negative effects on absorption.
The medication Mackenzie was taking had stopped her body from absorbing the antidepressants that she'd been used to taking for more than a decade.
I was in such a bad place that he suggested I go to hospital, stop taking it and contact Gina pet to let them know that I was no longer taking it and explain what the side effects of that had been for me.
Mackenzie followed the advice of her regular GP and stopped taking ozebic immediately, but due to the slow release nature of the drug, it took over a month for her to start feeling like herself again. The twenty six year old said she was surrounded by the right people and the right support to get herself back to feeling safe and happy. She considers herself one of the lucky ones, but Mackenzie holds broader concerns about what these prescribing practices could mean that at risk young people.
The fact that this is so freely available without even so much as a zoom call or a face to face check in is really really concerning to me, and I think something needs to be done regarding the access people have to this medication. I'm not saying that we should never use it and that it should be totally out of the question, but I think some kind of regulation needs to be put in place.
So how are these medications regulated and how many people are taking them in Australia.
The short answer to the second part of.
That question is really we have no idea, and that's because of the way that these drugs are classified by health regulators and something called the Pharmaceutical Benefit Scheme, The PBS.
Ozepic is funded by the Australian government, so on the PBS for those people who meet certain parameters around their type two diabetes, so those people need to be the ones who are prioritized to get access to it.
Let's break that down.
Ozepic is a PBIS listed drug for type two diabetes treatment, so because of that, it'll cost a diabetic around forty dollars a month to access. That doesn't mean it's illegal to use ozepic for other reasons, but it does mean prescriptions issued for a purpose other than diabetes, what's called off label uses, aren't subsidized by the PBS and therefore aren't tracked by it either. These private scripts also cost patients upwards of four hundred dollars a month.
The other two medications are not on the PBS for that indication.
Doctor Michael Bonning is talking about Munjaro and we go v but we gov could soon become cheaper for some people who take it after the TGA recently approved this drug as a treatment for heart disease in overweight patients. This means the Medicine regulator has determined there is satisfactory evidence that we govy is an effective complementary therapy for adults with both cardiovascular disease and high body mass index to reduce the related risk of heart attack, stroke or death.
We can find out how many people take ozenpic for type two diabetes treatment, and we might soon be able to find out how many people take we go v as a treatment for heart disease, But for everything else it's virtually impossible to determine and the scale of the use of these medications. Doctor Emma Beckett, a food and nutrition scientist and an adjunct Senior lecturer at UNSW, says this is an issue that needs to shift urgently.
My suspicion is the vast number of people accessing these medications in Australia are accessing them through telehealth and not through their standard GP. And for me, the question is why are they going to their standard GP, and their standard GP is going no, no, you don't need that, and you go to the people who are selling them directly and that's their purpose and they go, well, of
course you can have that. And so my question is about how do we look at that context because I don't think we have that data.
So without that database of prescriptions, we decided to look into this further to get a sense of how young people are engaging with these medications. Around twenty five thousand of you responded to a poll by The Daily Ods. Eleven percent told us they had used Ozenpic or a similar drug. We asked the eighty nine percent who hadn't used it if they've ever wanted to try ozenpic. Forty
three percent of respondents said yes. We heard from nurses, surgeons, GP and other health professionals who said GLP one medications licosenpic are among the most prescribed drugs in the country, but it's how people are accessing these drugs, or rather where they're getting their prescriptions that has some experts concerned.
If you Google interested in these drugs, the top hits are not results to studies, They're not informational pieces. They're links to the companies who are selling it, and medicine and marketing should not be disconnected in this way because I can't think of any other medication that happens like this.
On the next episode of Investigating Ozenpic, we take a closer look at the online providers prescribing weight loss medication in Australia. We'll look into their duty of care and whether or not they're meeting those responsibilities. We'll hear from the people who've accessed these drugs through these providers and those who've worked for them.
If these people started these companies to deliberately sell these weight loss drugs, that says there's a gap. That says when people are going to the doctor and having this conversation with their regular GP, they're not getting what they need.
We'll answer all your questions and more on part two. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. If it's raised any concerns for you, help is available twenty four to seven through lifelined on thirteen eleven fourteen. For eating disorder support, you can contact the Butterfly Foundation on one eight hundred eighty hope. That's one eight hundred three three four six seventy three. There are also some links to resources in today's episode description.
My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bunjelung Calcuttin woman from Gadighl Country.
The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and torrest Rate Island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.