Joanie Knight has a message for anyone considering drugs like Ozempic or Wegovy, which have become popular for the dramatic weight loss they can help people achieve.
“I wish I never touched it. I wish I’d never heard of it in my life,” said Knight, 37, from Angie, Louisiana. “This medicine made my life hell. So much hell. It has cost me money. It cost me a lot of stress. It cost me days and nights and trips with my family. It’s cost me a lot, and it’s not worth it. The price is too high.”
Brenda Allen, age 42, in Dallas, Texas, feels the same way. Her doctor prescribed Wegovy for weight loss. “And even now, being off the medication for almost a year, I’m still having a lot of problems,” Allen said in an interview with CNN.
She said she was at urgent care recently after vomiting so much she became dehydrated. Emily Wright, 38, a teacher in Toronto, Canada, started taking Ozempic in 2018. Over a year, she said she lost 80 pounds, which she’s been able to keep off.
But Wright said she now vomits so frequently she had to take a leave of absence from her job. “I’ve almost been off Ozempic for a year, but I’m still not back to my normal,” Wright said.
The diabetes drug Ozempic, and its sister drug for weight loss, Wegovy, utilize the same medication, semaglutide. These and other drugs in this family, including medications like tirzepatide and liraglutide, work by mimicking a hormone naturally made by the body, GLP-1. One of the roles of GLP-1 is to slow the passage of food through the stomach, which helps people feel fuller longer.
However, if the stomach slows down too much, that can cause problems. Knight and Wright have been diagnosed with severe gastroparesis, or stomach paralysis, which their doctors think may have resulted from or been exacerbated by the medication they were taking, Ozempic. Wright said she has also been diagnosed with cyclic vomiting syndrome, which causes her to throw up multiple times daily.
Allen doesn’t have a diagnosis for her stomach problems yet but said they started only after her doctor encouraged her to take Wegovy to lose weight. She is managing her ongoing nausea and vomiting with a medication called Zofran and prescription probiotics. At the same time, she waits for more tests in October — the first available appointments she could get with specialists.
Doctors say more cases like these are coming to light as the popularity of the drugs soared. The US Food and Drug Administration said it had received reports of patients on the medicines experiencing stomach paralysis that sometimes has not resolved by the time it’s reported. (READ MORE)
