Shrinking waistlines and growing profits: the weight-loss drug boom
It’s a trend rooted in making a profit. Advertisements for prescription-only weight-loss drugs are spreading all over the Internet – raising concerns among experts.
But the question remains: who is driving the boom?
Consider medications for other conditions, be it asthma or high blood pressure: a quick Internet search may turn up a number of online pharmacies, but not page after page of results with discount codes for consultations, special offers for returning customers or emails with coupons .
But when it comes to slimming injections, it’s a different story.
Boots is offering returning customers a 10% discount every time they reorder a slimming treatment – a promotion that appears at the bottom of a page featuring Wegovy, Mounjaro and other prescription-only drugs.
Online company Pharmacy2U lists the prices of drugs including Wegovy and Mounjaro, along with a promotional code that entitles customers to £40 off their first four-week supply.
In a different approach, Daily Chemist emails £25 credits for weight loss orders to customers, with a link taking them straight to prescription-only weight loss medications. Such emails have been sent to people who have previously informed the pharmacy that they have a healthy weight.
A Boots spokesperson said promotional activities for Boots Online Doctor services also complied with applicable legislation, MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) guidelines and ASA advertising codes.
“All Boots Online Doctor prices apply to the full service – from online consultation to aftercare and support – and not just prescription medicines,” they said.
“Weight loss treatment is most effective when used consistently, alongside major lifestyle changes. We offer a 10% discount on the Boots Online Doctor slimming service for returning patients to encourage them to stay with us and receive continuity of care.
A spokesperson for Pharmacy2U said: “All discounts offered as part of our private online doctor service comply with GPhC (General Pharmaceutical Council) guidelines and MHRA and relate exclusively to the services provided by our highly qualified doctors. Patients have the option to ask our GPs for treatment advice as part of the consultation.”
Daily Chemist did not respond to a request for comment. The MHRA and ASA said they would review the advertisements to decide whether they merited investigation.
In each of these cases, the quoted web page was just one click away from the online pharmacy’s homepage, apparently contradicting advice from the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA).
“Marketers must ensure that casually surfing consumers do not easily come across information about POMs,” the ASA says in its advice ‘Prescription medicines (websites)’.
Dr. Piotr Ozieranski, from the University of Bath, who researches the political sociology of medicine and the pharmaceutical industry, said the concerns were not limited to public marketing, with Novo Nordisk – the pharmaceutical company behind Saxenda, Ozempic and Wegovy – previously was in trouble. for his practices.
Novo Noridsk was expelled from the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry in 2023 for, among other things, sponsoring biased training for healthcare professionals around Saxenda, and offering individual healthcare professionals patient group direction (PGD) allowing them to administer the drug without a prescription from a doctor or other prescriber – a move that was seen as an inducement to prescribe it.
However, pharmaceutical industry insiders have emphasized that advertisements for prescription-only weight-loss drugs are not driven by the pharmaceutical industry, noting that demand is already sky-high.
It appears that it is an approach being taken by the pharmacies themselves.
The financial gain for pharmacies offering slimming jabs is phenomenal: a month’s supply costs a patient around £150 for the lowest dose, rising to around £250 a month for the highest dose.
With around 60% of the UK population suffering from obesity or overweight, and the jabs requiring constant use to maintain weight loss, industry insiders told the Guardian the drugs could save pharmacies hundreds of thousands of pounds a year.
Ozieranski notes the company Pharmadoctor, which sells clinical service packages to pharmacists, has an online calculator that allows pharmacists to make an estimate the profit they could make.
The result is that weight-loss drugs are an attractive prospect for online businesses and brick-and-mortar pharmacies that are already struggling to stay open.
However, Ozieranski says it is the pharmaceutical companies that have created a parallel private market for such drugs, while Prof. Simon Capewell of the University of Liverpool noted that pharmaceutical companies benefit financially from advertising the drugs.
“Anything that is going to promote the visibility, acceptability and normality of this (type of) drug has to be positive for the pharmaceutical companies,” Capewell said.