Accessing Affordable Semaglutide, Tirzepatide & GLP-1s After The FDAs Halt On Compounded Versions

Transcript of Accessing Affordable Semaglutide, Tirzepatide & GLP-1s After The FDAs Halt On Compounded Versions

Note: Some wording in the transcript has been lightly edited for readability.

Sireen Abu Chacra:
Today’s topic is, How can I access affordable GLP-1s—the weight loss treatment?

Dr. Jason Pencek:
Basically what’s happened over the last few months is we have lost access to compounded semaglutide and tirzepatide. The FDA’s come in and said that these drugs are no longer in shortage (which is basically Ozempic and Mounjaro). Now these drugs are not in shortage, we can’t get them compounded anymore. This has been a major issue for a lot of people who want to, for example, lower the dose of it or use less of the medications.

Dr. Jason Pencek:
The GLP-1s are amazing for weight loss but a lot of people out there can no longer get them because they’re going to their primary care physicians and their doctors are saying, “hey, we don’t need it.” You don’t qualify, and all of a sudden the treatment becomes expensive, thousands of dollars a month¹, and people don’t know what to do.

Luckily for us, the way around this right now that the compounding pharmacies are using is they’re compounding with usually B6 or B12. They’re putting something else in there and we’re saying that this is the reason we’re using it in patients. As practitioners, what we’re actually doing is we’re telling the compounding pharmacies, “hey, this patient gets really nauseous
we need that B6 in there,” or “We need that B12 in there because they’re getting
some fatigue.” So there is a way around it right now. There are compounding pharmacies still making these. The actual semaglutide or tirzepatide by itself is not being compounded but when it’s put together something else compounding pharmacies can still make it.

So what’s really great about this is that there are companies still out there still producing these
peptides are still getting access to them for the patients. From my point of view, as a practitioner, I see a lot of patients who come to me and they can’t pay that $1000 a month. In my practice I use it for a lot of things outside of just weight loss. We use GLP-1s for inflammation or to help with craving reduction. So we’re seeing all these long term benefits of these things and the problem is people don’t want to spend $1000 a month to be on the stuff long term.