Do you live in Canada? Curious if you had an issue shipping to US?
The semaglutide weight-loss miracle has a dark side: As desperate patients contend with shortages and sky-high prices, a world of criminals and con artists are filling the void with life-threatening fakes. Katherine Eban investigates our alarmingly active pharmaceutical underground.
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The plot of the South Park special episode about Ozempic is partly about ordering the powder from India and creating their own injectables. Something similar is happening here it seems, with some fraud in the mix.
Counterfeit pen with insulin is extremely dangerous, these criminals are extremely immoral.
European investigators tracing the origin of the counterfeit pens sold by the plastic surgeon followed the chain of custody through a web of distributors in Austria, Germany, and the UK and back to an all-too-familiar home base: Turkey. Specifically, an exporter in Ankara named AUB Healthcare was identified as being a conduit for the counterfeits.
Turkish Ozempic not good (in fact any black market ozempic)?
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The glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide (GIP)/GLP-1 dual agonist showed significant differences in LDL-C (range of mean differences: −11.61 to −6.77%p), triglycerides (−19.94 to −13.31%p), and T-CHO (−7.94 to −5.09%p) levels compared to placebo, insulin, and sodium-glucose co-transporter 2 (SGLT2) inhibitors.
The GLP-1 agonist significantly reduced T-CHO (−5.20%p; −6.39%p) and LDL-C (−4.32%p; −8.17%p) levels compared to placebo and SGLT2 inhibitors, respectively.
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As @Rapasailor said above CanShipMeds can’t get Ozempic, it is pseudo banned in Canada I gather. AgelessRX has it available from a compound pharmacy for $240/mo. I may try for a short spell to help get my BMI just right and my 1.19lbs of visceral fat to zero.
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Ended up ordering OZ from Ageless. Got it yesterday and did my first dose today. .25mg subcon injection. Easy. I have done peptides this way before so it was natural. Ageless has good videos for those that are not comfortable with self injections. I’ll report back on sides, experience, and results. Plan to do another DexaScan in 3 months to see the specifics.
Just FYI…I saw a TV ad that Hims now offers compounded Semaglutide. It ain’t cheap at a listed price of $199/month but maybe if you talked with their doc, you could do a lower maintenance dose.
I’m sure other telemedicine places will start offering it as production ramps up.
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My wife has an online appt to try HenryMeds new compounded oral tirzepatide (supposedly absorbed via capillaries under tongue). I’ll report results (if any) after she’s tried it.
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Ozempic’s U.S. markup
A Wegovy prescription costs about $1,349 per month in the U.S., while it costs just $140 in Germany and $92 in the U.K. Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic carries similar markups.
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The Chinese bootleggers are now turning a profit making Tirzepatide for $0.80/mg, not a typo. That’s shipped, with 3rd party arranged and executed purity testing. The quality is high and the competition is intense.
I don’t pay attention to semaglutide, but it has always been even cheaper.
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Semaglutide for the prevention of atrial fibrillation: A systematic review and meta-analysis 2024
Twenty-one trials comprising 25957 patients were included. In the overall pooled analysis, semaglutide decreased AF occurrence compared to control drugs (RR 0.70, 95 % CI 0.52–0.95). This result was consistent in trials using other antihyperglycemic medications as controls (RR 0.43, 95 % CI 0.21–0.89), but not in placebo-controlled trials (RR 0.77, 95 % CI 0.56–1.07). The outcome was favorable for patients with T2DM (RR 0.71, 95 % CI 0.52–0.97), but not for patients with overweight or obesity (RR 0.56, 95 % CI 0.18–1.73). Results varied by type of semaglutide, with oral semaglutide showing an RR of 0.49 (95 % CI 0.25–0.97) and subcutaneous semaglutide showing an RR of 0.77 (95 % CI 0.55–1.07).
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I have been on OZ (compound pharmacy) .25mg for three weeks now. Here are my thoughts. Day 1 and to a lesser extent Day 2 I feel more tired than usual. I also feel some general GI uneasiness. Higher acid content, more burping and a little nauseas. For meals I feel fuller more quickly and overall less hungry. By day 3 I am pretty normal and by Day 5 hungry again. After 3 weeks I am about flat weight-wise and maybe even up a pound which is kinda weird. I realize .25 is a low dose and titrating my system to get used to it. Hoping the move to .5mg has a bigger effect on the scale/visceral fat otherwise I will stop. Juice isn’t worth the squeeze. More to follow.
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Has anyone measured their fasting serum insulin before/after semaglutide?
This 2022 paper (Semaglutide improves cardiometabolic risk factors in adults
with overweight or obesity: STEP 1 and 4 exploratory analyses) found a significant reduction in insulin with semaglutide vs placebo (in “people with overweight/obesity without diabetes”).
In STEP 1, reductions in waist circumference, SBP, DBP, FPG, fasting serum insulin, lipids and HOMA‐IR were greater with semaglutide versus placebo (p ≤ .001).
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Update: wife and I both had ZERO effect from the HenryMeds.com oral tirzepatide, so whatever sublingual formulation they’re using from their compounding pharmacy appears to be junk (unabsorbable, assuming it actually contains tirzepatide as advertised).
At first we thought we were somehow getting appetite suppression with no side effects, but then we went to a 4th of July party and quickly realized that it had all been a placebo. Thankfully at least HM has a 30 day money back guarantee, so let’s hope they honor it.
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“The practitioner steered me toward the injectable version of the medication instead of the pill version that Henry offers, noting that it had more evidence of efficacy.”
So even they admit it’s junk
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Each matched cohort included 23,386 (semaglutide vs sitagliptin), 22,584 (vs empagliflozin), and 19,206 (vs glipizide) patients. Semaglutide was not associated with an increased risk of neurological and psychiatric outcomes. Instead, after multiple-testing correction, semaglutide was associated with reduced risk for several such outcomes, notably cognitive deficit compared to sitagliptin (HR 0.72, 95% CI 0.64–0.80) and glipizide (HR 0.72, 95% CI 0.63–0.81), dementia compared to sitagliptin (HR 0.52, 95% CI 0.40–0.68), and nicotine misuse across most comparisons (HR 0.72, 95% CI 0.61–0.85 against glipizide; HR 0.77, 95% CI 0.65–0.90 against empagliflozin; HR 0.82, 95% CI 0.70–0.95 against sitagliptin, though the latter was no longer statistically significant after adjustment for multiple comparisons). Empagliflozin showed fewest differences from semaglutide. No differences in NCOs were observed between cohorts.
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A preprint out of China, so take it with a grain of salt. Also - given most of the people taking GLP agonist drugs are overweight, how much of the benefit is simply them getting more healthy (slowing the accelerated aging of obesity) vs. actual age mitigation.
Functional & multi-omic aging rejuvenation with GLP-1R agonism: GLP-1R agonists not only help manage diabetes but also show promise in rejuvenating aging processes at cellular and molecular levels. They target key pathways to enhance longevity and…”
Related:
Aging Mice Treated With A GLP-1 Agonist That Is Commonly Used In Weight Loss Drugs Start Exhibiting “Age-Counteracting Effects”
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