Credit…Illustration by Andrei Cojocaru; Photographs by Getty Images Three hours after Becky Cheairs injected herself with the first dose of compounded semaglutide, she started to vomit. Crouched over the toilet, reeling from nausea, she thought there was no way she would make it on the R.V. trip from Arkansas to San Antonio she had planned that weekend.
She was right: She spent the next day throwing up at least once an hour.
Like many others, Ms. Cheairs, 66, had taken the drug to lose weight. But she hadn’t taken the brand-name products Ozempic or Wegovy, which come in pens pre-filled with a specific dose. Instead, the medication she was prescribed through a telehealth service came with a vial and a bag of syringes to draw the drug out herself.
Ms. Cheairs’ husband asked how much she had taken, then read the instructions. He was shocked: Ms. Cheairs had accidentally given herself five times the amount she was supposed to take.
Accidents like this are becoming more common. There have been 159 calls to national poison control centers so far this year involving compounded GLP-1s, the class of medications that includes semaglutide. In 2023, there were only 32.
The vast majority of these calls are from people who took too much medication, said Kait Brown, the clinical managing director at America’s Poison Centers. The problem has become so concerning that the Food and Drug Administration issued a warning last month about people overdosing on compounded semaglutide. Some patients have been hospitalized, developed pancreatitis or gallstones, or have fainted or become dehydrated. Some patients had taken 10 or even 20 times more than the intended dose.
The demand for Ozempic and similar drugs has pushed compounded medications, once a somewhat niche corner of health care , into the mainstream. There isn’t solid data on how many people take compounded GLP-1s. But some estimates have suggested millions of Americans may be seeking them out, often, because they are looking for a cheaper option or can’t find the brand-name drug in stock.
When the F.D.A. lists a medication as “currently in shortage,” as semaglutide injections are, compounding pharmacies can purchase […]
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