Ozempic: Wonderdrug Or Weight Loss Fad We look into Ozempic and its sister drug Wygovy to analyse its impact on the world and whether or not it's good.

Ozempic: Wonderdrug Or Weight Loss Fad

Ozempic has taken over the conversion around weight loss and we want to examine if that's a good thing.

POSTED 12.06.24 04:35 BY SOPHIE CLARK

Ozempic and its sister medication Wegovy are the same chemical, semaglutide, but in different doses. When they first came on the market Ozempic was purely for diabetes treatment and Wegovy was a weight loss drug.

As a diabetes treatment, Ozempic is truly the wonder drug it's marketed as. It is lifesaving. The clinical trials were groundbreaking and also where the idea to create Wegovy, and market it as a weight loss drug.

When we step into the world of weight loss that's where we come into the problems with the medication. The world where we leave body positivity at the door and worship thin bodies.

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The weight loss clinical trials showed the drug was far more effective than any other weight loss drug ever released before. But that unfortunately doesn't mean much.

That's if it even works at all. In the trials there was a very narrow study group, primarily white participants (75%), excluding anyone who even has a chance of being pregnant, excluding people with mental health problems.

While being within a specific group makes the drug more sure to work, that statistics laid out bare take away a lot of the superpower facade that the drug has.

A third of people lose more than 20% of their body weight, half lose around 10%. But what if you're in that other half that doesn't lose weight? If your goal is to lose weight you're taking a drug for very little.

More immediately pressing than the under-researched efficacy, is the worldwide shortage. The shortage began with Wegovy, leading to doctors prescribing Ozempic for weight loss, causing a worldwide shortage of all semaglutide products, making it challenging for some people with diabetes to find where to get Ozempic.

We think that if fat bodies were more respected and not seen as something that needed to be fixed at any cost there would never have been this shortage in the first place. Ozempic is a wonder drug for people with diabetes and treating it as a weight loss drug is harmful to people who need it and to the body positivity movement as a whole.