Faking obesity – that’s how easily he got a prescription for weight loss medicine

The diabetes medication Ozempic shines with its absence from Swedish pharmacies. The shortage mainly affects diabetics, but despite this, Uppdrag ganskning’s reporter Erik Galli got medicine from six out of nine online doctors, when he pretended to be overweight.

I generated an image of an overweight man in an AI service, says Erik Galli.

Mission review reporter Erik Galli has followed the drug Ozempic’s explosive journey, from being a diabetes medicine to becoming a celebrity weight loss cure in the US and then the whole world. Driven by curiosity, he asked himself the question: “How prepared is our system for this enormous demand?”, and it was a question he tested in reality.

Some clinics only require a photo and login with Bank ID. So I generated an image of an overweight man in an AI service that was super easy to do, says reporter Erik Galli.

Lied about being overweight

Erik has a BMI of just over 20, but pretended to be overweight in meetings with doctors and requested Ozempic. He continues:

Some clinics also have video meetings as a routine. Then I just showed up as myself. Two of the doctors chose to go ahead and write prescriptions despite seeing me. So they seemed to buy that I weighed 130 kilos, he says.

It turned out that six out of nine online doctors prescribed the medicine to Erik despite his thinness and that in some cases it was also clearly visible. But it was a doctor who stood out.

One of the doctors who refused me saw that I looked thin and asked me to lift my shirt. Then he said that if I really want to go ahead with this, I can come into the clinic and weigh myself on the spot, says Erik Galli.

Confronted the doctors

So “How prepared is our system for this huge demand?”, reporter Erik Galli concluded that the video meetings that precede a discharge are not 100 percent reliable. In addition, he confronted the doctors who prescribed the medicine, and no one could state that they were serious about what had happened.

If I could do this, there’s no telling how many more have.

According to a recent study, one in eight Americans has tried a weight-loss medicine like Ozempic, and in Sweden, sales are skyrocketing. So far this year, 45,000 packs have been sold. But in the neighboring country of Norway, Ozempic was stopped earlier this summer for slimming purposes.