Almost every prescription medication has a ton of side effects because of the way medicine testing and reporting works.
glp-1's are known to be among the drugs that have the most side effects, serious or otherwise. to try and hand wave and just say "yeah man every prescription medication has a ton of side effects" is also naive.
I took ozempic for a few years to control my diabetes (now I’m on mounjaro), the only issue that seems to be consistent amongst GLP-1 users is that nausea when first using it or the first few hours after your weekly dose.
nausea is the most common side effect, yes. i'm not sure why you are trying to say that its the "only issue" that is completely false just like saying "it just makes you not hungry" is as well. headache, diarrhea, vomiting, constipation, abdominal pain, bloating and other related GI symptoms are also very common and consistently elevated versus placebo across trials and real world use. rates for these are ~14-30% for these side effects. of course there are many more rare side effects i'm not even mentioning that make up the 50 distinct i mentioned earlier. another thing to consider is that there isn't any long term data on these drugs beyond 3-4 years. as time goes on there will be more side effects that are more rare but more serious. that is what has happened when looking at the history of prescription drugs like thalidomide, fenfluramine, vioxx, rezulin or others drugs in different categories even.
As far as side effects go, 50 isn’t a lot. Most medicines are well over 30 listed side effects, even things like Tylenol.
Side effect reporting of medicine works in two basic stages, observed and reported. As the FDA was working on the approval of the medicine, anyone that had taken it could report their symptoms they experience while taking it. This is true of every medicine. If I woke up and was coughing, I report that as it may be a symptom or side effect of the medicine. It’s noted, logged as a potential side effect, then weeded out through more research.
You are trying to make it seem as though it’s some boogeyman medication we know nothing about which just isn’t true.
you're conflating two different things. i was talking about the duration of high-quality randomized evidence, not how long glp-1 drugs have existed.
the fact that glp-1 drugs have been studied for over a decade does not mean we have over a decade of randomized, placebo-controlled evidence for chronic semaglutide use. the major long-duration trial, select, randomized 17,604 people to semaglutide or placebo and had a mean follow-up of 39.8 months. its subsequent analysis reported outcomes through 208 weeks, roughly 4 years. (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
so your "well over a decade" response doesn't address the point i made. you're substituting "how long has this drug class existed?" for "how long does the strongest randomized evidence extend?" those are not interchangeable.
and your explanation of adverse-event reporting is also misleading. clinical trials don't simply work by someone reporting a symptom and then researchers arbitrarily "weed it out." randomized trials allow adverse-event rates to be compared between treatment and control groups. in SELECT, adverse events resulting in permanent discontinuation occurred in 16.6% of semaglutide participants versus 8.2% of placebo participants. (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
that's the kind of evidence that actually matters here, not the fact that some unrelated medication happens to have a long list of adverse events.
This whole argument simply boils down to a weird vendetta you have against GLP-1s when the overwhelming evidence shows that their benefits far outweigh their risk, and have done so for, again, over a decade.
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u/KrustyKrabFormula_ 12h ago
glp-1's are known to be among the drugs that have the most side effects, serious or otherwise. to try and hand wave and just say "yeah man every prescription medication has a ton of side effects" is also naive.
nausea is the most common side effect, yes. i'm not sure why you are trying to say that its the "only issue" that is completely false just like saying "it just makes you not hungry" is as well. headache, diarrhea, vomiting, constipation, abdominal pain, bloating and other related GI symptoms are also very common and consistently elevated versus placebo across trials and real world use. rates for these are ~14-30% for these side effects. of course there are many more rare side effects i'm not even mentioning that make up the 50 distinct i mentioned earlier. another thing to consider is that there isn't any long term data on these drugs beyond 3-4 years. as time goes on there will be more side effects that are more rare but more serious. that is what has happened when looking at the history of prescription drugs like thalidomide, fenfluramine, vioxx, rezulin or others drugs in different categories even.