I have an old epi pen but I imagine it expired a decade ago… thx for the reminder.
I wasn’t sure if this was typical or perhaps I was allergic, so I’m glad you shared it might be common and is less likely an allergy. This isn’t bad enough to discourage me from using it. We shall see how I feel at a higher dose.
@Kelman I’ve also read GKU stings quite a bit. I guess people ‘in the know’ mix various things together with the goal of toning down the ‘bite’. Look at me knowing the lingo!
Can one of you pros recommend your favorite brand of pens and where to buy them. I’m happy to pay a little more to make sure everything is sterile.
Also, I assume one needs to use their own pen and not share it, correct? I ask because I give two cats the same injections multiple times per week. I’d love it if they could share a pen and I just swap out needles.
EDIT: Steve, I looked and your recommended pens are not available for purchase in the US.
There are a lot of other vendors with the exact same pens on Alibaba, just search around and you will find them.
As far as “sterile”, these are reusable devices that use replaceable cartridges
The pen is not sterile, doesn’t need to be.
The cartridge is sterile
You have to fill the cartridge yourself.
The needles for these pens are sterile.
Thanks Steve,
I do realize I need sterile needles and cartridges, so I was looking for a source for those.
I don’t know of any peptide that is supposed to make you “fly” if that was your expectation, you read too many influencer blogs and watched too many videos 
Peptides are life, you cannot exist without them.
Like many things they decline as we age so I choose to “supplement” my declining peptides.
With regard to how they make me “feel”…
I take Vit C - don’t feel anything
I take Vit D - don’t feel anything
I take proteins - don’t feel anything
I take… a long list of things that don’t make me “feel” anything including prescription BP meds and Statins. Should I stop taking those because I don’t feel anything? That would be illogical.
If “feeling” is the only criteria for deciding to use something, there would be a lot of things I’d stop doing and some I would start back up again. Nothing made me feel better than hauling down a twisty road at 200kph on one of my bikes, but that made my wife feel nervous so based on her feeling I had to sell my last bike this past summer 
With regards to PED’s they are much different and way more powerful in their actions than peptides. There are no anabolic peptides but there are a lot of anabolic drugs that work for the intended purpose and will make you “feel” all the good feels
The initial reason for me trying peptides was based on 100’s of reviews I read on various forums (and some in here, including yourself if I’m not mistaken) saying that oh I felt this and I felt that, so I tried and waited for those “feels” but there was ZERO feels, so I stopped them. The reason why I even mention my experience is to let people know that most if not all “feels” that you read or hear somewhere are actually placebo. From your message above it seems you are agreeing that even yourself don’t have many feels which is refreshing to hear because it gives people the unfiltered truth.
At least this way they will know not expect an immediate response from using them.
As for the prescription meds don’t know about you, but I do feel a difference with most, and also you get the results from blood work, so you know they are doing what they are supposed to be doing.
Now, is there a good case to be made for peptide use, maybe but I have no clue because I have not researched them much. My opinion is that some of them might probably be beneficial, especially in long run, but I simply haven’t had the time to dig deep enough into the subject, whereas all the meds I’m taking I have researched and concluded that they are the right ones for health, disease prevention and most likely for longevity. In my experience with peptides, I merely proved (to myself) that all the claims about peptides fixing this and being such life changing substances was not the case and likely those claims were based on placebo effect.
I’ll eventually do more digging into the subject (when I have more free time) and most likely than not might end up finishing the current stash I have (and maybe, big maybe reorder some) but I am NOT going to pin myself 20 times per day just because some random dude somewhere on internet had a great placebo effect LOL.
Again, I have absolutely no credentials on the subject to tell you nor anyone if they work or not. I simply shared my experience. To each their own but I’m with @DrFraser where he had an excellent post about his stack, and this is the summary:
So my focused stack is:
Rapamycin cyclically with blood monitoring
SGLT2-i
Low dose GLP if tolerated
Telmisartan if needed
+/- items like Methylene Blue/NAD agents/NAC Ethyl ester
Statin
Ezetimibe
Low dose doxycycline and lithium
Dasatinib + Quercetin/Fisetin q2-3 months
Omega 3 optimization with agents that get into the brain
Homocysteine/Vitamin D optimization
I suspect that list gets 90% of any benefit on prevention based upon what I know right now.
Each of these agents has rationale, risks/benefits, and will be working through somewhat different pathways.
Apparently, I don’t see a peptide in his stack so if he includes one in the future I’ll be first to follow suit LOL
This is getting slightly off topic but, if you need pens, supplies, this guy is US Based and ships fast:
https://www.undergroundsupply.shop/
Regarding peptides, I’ve experimented with several (BPC-157, retatrutide, SS-31, TA-1, GHK-CU injectable).
Reta and GHK are the only ones I’ll really continue.
And Reta is completely a class of its own. It demolished my cholesterol, made it impossible for my blood sugar to rise past 130 on CGM (even while eating pure white rice), and made me shredded.
4 posts were merged into an existing topic: Retatrutide - better than semaglutide b/c WAY lower nausea/side effect profile
Amazon sells peptide pens.
Incase this helps anyone else… someone generously shared with me that if you inject deeper, you’ll have a lower chance of ISR.
So, today I injected aprox 3mg and I inserted my insulin syringe deeper. While it’s a little red, it’s much less red and significantly less itchy than when I previously injected a much smaller amount. I could have even gone deeper, but I don’t know what is under there and just too nervous to hit something I’m not supposed to!
A method to get deeper but avoid doing an intramuscular shot is to pinch up the skin to make a “tent” and then inject diagonally into the far end of the tent.
I’ve had the cleanest injections into the glutes, with 1/4" insulin needles. No reaction even from GHK-cu, which has been in my experience the most irritating peptide.
Please ask Hazel if she would inject a relative with kidney disease. If so, at what dose and for how long?
Thanks
I just found this on Open Evidence
I looked after going down a rabbit hole and seeing someone mention it might be good for kidney disease (from an unreliable source)
Edit:
And
Well, peptides have the potential to be incredibly powerful.
There is peptide on that list, the GLP-1’s, 9 are FDA approved, there are also 3 growth hormone related peptides FDA approved (Sermorelin, Tesamorelin, CJC-1295 analogs), there are some in the oncology and rare disease areas also. Naturally, the first FDA approved peptide was insulin and all of the variations thereof.
Most recently for myself, I’ve driven up my deep sleep from 12%, up to 30% with almost all being >20% in the last week, after 2 weeks for DSIP. It’s pretty hard to fake that - similar results in my wife. As this is the sleep phase where glymphatic activation occurs - I’m pretty happy with that one!
@DrFraser
Great job on extra deep sleep!!
I am curious as to what you think a good deep sleep number is for total time, or, as it appears, you mostly look at % of time?
I usually get between 45-90 minutes (mostly aprox 1 hour), so I thought I was pretty good (according to Oura), but today was the first time I looked at the %… I get a lot of REM %, so I see my deep sleep % is never that great…
I’m averaging 1:48 a night with DSIP, the app says mine is greater than 82% of people using this app.
@Steve_Combi , you are a deep sleep Rockstar!! Is this Oura, and if so, where did you find comparison info?
Eight Sleep sent me a 2025 summary…. I’ll brag because my results are due to everyone here!!
(And 2024 was already better than 2023!)
It says I’m in the top 10%!!!
Sincerely,
a lifelong insomniac… or should I say former insomniac
Congrats on the improvements in your sleep!!
I looked for a tracker that did not require a subscription for the data I was interested in and settled on the AmazeFit brand. I have their BIP 5 smart watch, $119, and no sub. required for all the data. You can subscribe for more “analysis” but I don’t need that.
I was not concerned about duration of sleep but curious about the phases of sleep, Deep (delta wave) and REM. Getting enough Deep sleep is an important metric to track from what I’ve been reading about glymphatic activity.
The app provides the “group” comparison.
This is my result from last night.
On the glymphatic activity, if I’m remembering it correctly, you felt oxytocin might help with that as well.
I’ll report back if DSIP helps my deep sleep.
My REM is crazy long… usually 2-3 hours. Do you have any thoughts on the REM subject? I ask because Google has told me it’s a negative, but I don’t know if it’s always a bad thing if it’s not at the expense of other good sleep metrics.
