United States: A woman from Louisville claimed that a famous slimming pill prescribed for Type 2 diabetes nearly took her life.
WDRB Investigates then began to look into the other side of Ozempic and similar drugs and discovered thousands of others are suffering, too.
Case in detail
The doctors prescribed Ozempic to manage Jacqueline Barber’s Type 2 diabetes back when she took it in 2021, but it caused her a lot of complications, and she could not eat.
Barber stated that what little she could manage to eat without vomiting was small portions of peanuts, peanut butter crackers, and peanut butter cookies.
She added, “To lay on the couch and throw up nonstop, can hardly make it to walk, go anywhere, it’s very depressing,” and, “I ended up losing 140 pounds. I was down to around 87 pounds, couldn’t walk or get around, couldn’t get off the couch. Nobody knew what was going on. No one put the two together,” as wdrb.com reported.
Although diabetes levels of Barber’s came under control when her doctors asked her to stop taking the Ozempic after two years in 2023, mainly because of the complications she had started to feel.
Barber explained, “My stomach was paralyzed,” and “I couldn’t tolerate anything.”
What more are the experts stating?
Moreover, she had developed gastroparesis, but according to experts, she is not a lone case where the drugs for weight loss were being taken, and complications were generated.
According to Dr. John Oldham, a bariatric surgeon with Baptist Health, “What gastroparesis is, when food goes down to the stomach and it doesn’t empty out to the small intestine, so it just sits in the stomach,” as wdrb.com reported.
He added, “You just need to make sure you are doing this through your doctor. You’re going to have follow up. You’re going to have bloodwork (to see) that you are tolerating the medication well,” and, “Ozempic and Wegovy, on average, we’re seeing 15% of weight loss.”
Oldham noted that there are several benefits of the drugs, such as helping in curing cardiovascular and kidney diseases.
According to him, “The rare things, the thyroid tumors, cancers, we have not seen though,” and, “That’s what we saw in rodents when the study came out.”
Oldham also said that those patients with a history of thyroid complications are not prescribed such medicines.
He said, “The biggest side effect with this medicine is nausea,” while adding that the nausea must last for a few hours only, and if it takes longer time to cure, one must consult a doctor.
He said further, “When I just left the hospital to come over today, (I) was counseled on a patient that came to the emergency room this morning who took her second dose of Mounjaro medication. Just three hours later, she was having abdominal pain, bloating.”
“Her CT scan is actually showing a gastric outlet obstruction, where her stomach is very dilated full of food, not wanting to pass,” he continued.
He said there are several other cases of complications, too.
While talking about several other associated complications of the drugs, he said, “I just had a study a couple of days ago; the patient died from necroptosis, pancreatitis. The patient was taking Mounjaro, Zepbound; I don’t know if the medication caused pancreatitis.”