The pressure on Ozempic is so great that the Swedish Medicines Agency issued a strong advice against prescribing the medicine to anyone other than patients with type 2 diabetes. But since 2021, the proportion of all those receiving semaglutide (the substance Ozempic contains) prescribed without having diabetes has increased from 3.3 to almost 18 percent.
Semaglutide lowers blood sugar, but also reduces appetite in many people.
Mission review reporter tests Ozempic
Medicine for those most in need?
Ozempic is primarily intended for diabetics, but the medicine has also become very popular with people who want to lose weight. Last year, 126,000 Swedes were prescribed semaglutide, and the prescriptions are only increasing. The medicine has become difficult to obtain, even for people with a prescription.
Mission review reporter, completely lacking in need, fills out an online form to get hold of Ozempic. And unlike diabetics who can travel for hours to different places
pharmacy – the medicine is delivered directly to the reporter’s home from the pharmacy with which the online clinic Ayd cooperates.
– I’m still surprised that I didn’t have to lay down or anything, says Erik Galli in Uppdrag review’s series “The hunt for Ozempic”.
Ayd offers Ozempic for weight loss, but not for diabetes treatment.
UG: That’s why we test Ozempic from the black market
In the series, reporter Erik Galli tests the medicine and experiences its side effects. Among other things, he tries to order weight-loss drugs from the black market.
– We want to get as close to this topic as possible. One way was to try it yourself. It is associated with some risk, just like many of our reportages, but we made the assessment that it was still more responsible than, for example, filming another person who would then be exposed to the same risk, says Uppdrag gränskning’s responsible publisher Axel Björklund.
When asked how the Task Review reporter could become a patient, the online clinic Ayd replies: “In all types of care there is a risk that patients lie about their health history, identity or symptoms. Healthcare depends on mutual trust between doctor and patient”.
This is how Ozempic works – the drug that has taken the world by storm