Currently in Columbia
COLUMBIA – A hack on social media to promote weight loss quickly has turned into a bottleneck for diabetic patients just looking to fill their prescriptions. It’s happening across the nation and even right here in mid-Missouri.
Brands like Ozempic, Monjaro, Wegovy and Trulicity are just some of the medications that are hard for patients to find who suffer from Type 2 Diabetes. These weekly injections help lower A1C (blood sugar) levels, reduce the amount of sugar that leaves the liver and slows down food leaving the stomach to help prevent sugar spikes.
This causes people who take the medication to become full from eating faster and for a longer period of time, which naturally promotes weight loss as a side effect. Social media influencers capitalized on this through platforms like TikTok and have now caused many people to follow suit who don’t need the drug for its primary purpose.
Since the increase in social media posts, demand has soared leaving supplies unable to catch up. Head Pharmacist Bill Morrissey has been seeing this first hand at Kilgores on Providence road.
“We’ve had folks calling us from other pharmacies that we normally don’t take care of that had issues there to see if we had it [medications] in stock,” Morrissey said.
Morrissey says the situation is more of an inconvenience than anything. Many times people who take the weekly injections wait until they take their last dose and then start trying to refill their prescription a couple of days after.
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“If they order it on a Monday and they need it on a Monday, it might not be till Wednesday or Thursday that it actually gets there,” Morrissey said. “It’s kind of like robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
Morrissey suggests patients order their prescriptions ahead of time to not throw off medication schedules.
Morrissey went on to say that he thinks manufacturers were not anticipating the high demand and the inadvertent reason for it being weight loss. However, there are some indirect measures in place that make it harder for people who want the medication for solely weight loss to get it over patients who need it for diabetic purposes.
“There are insurance companies and some manufacturer coupons that help with these medicines that are requiring a Type 2 Diabetes diagnosis to cover those medicines…the folks who are using it for weight loss, a lot of insurance companies are not covering it. And these medicines are pretty expensive. There is over a thousand dollars for a monthly supply if insurance isn’t covering it.”
As long as demand remains as high as it is for these medications, Morrissey encourages people to stay patient.
“We just have to plan ahead a little bit,” Morrissey said.
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Currently in Columbia