January 29, 2025 — FDA yesterday approved Ozempic (semaglutide) to prevent kidney failure and death in persons with type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease. This fits with one of the five trends for this year: the steady expansion of health benefits for advanced medicines used in obesity and diabetes. But note that this approval covers the use of […]
January 16, 2025 — This will be an interesting year for drug pricing, especially for obesity medicines – if you can even figure out what is really going on with them. It appears that list prices for Ozempic (semaglutide), Mounjaro (tirzepatide), and Zepbound (also tirzepatide) have all gone up this year. The Wegovy (semaglutide) list price did not change. […]
January 10, 2025 — Let’s talk selfies. For me, they were my reality check. Full-body shots? Forget it. Every milestone photo with my family got run through every beautification filter the App Store could throw at me, but nothing could match the image I wanted to see staring back. That’s when I knew – it was time for a […]
January 7, 2025 — It used to be that this was the time of year when popular culture turned its attention to weight loss season. The release of U.S. News rankings of “Best Diets” commanded media attention. Weight loss tips were everywhere. But no more is this true. No, idle talk about weight loss has not disappeared. But it […]
December 24, 2024 — “Skinny ‘Treezempic’ Christmas trees are this year’s holiday trend,” says the Washington Post. Yes, it has finally happened. Ozempic has encroached on our favorite holiday. Tight budgets, design aesthetics, and tight living spaces are favoring extremely slender Christmas trees this year and social media has dubbed the look Treezempic. Melissa Mills, a senior vice president […]
December 13, 2024 — Some pharmacy benefit plans have taken a dark turn when it comes to obesity medicines. Let’s not sugarcoat it. They are exploiting people with obesity through abusive copays on drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic – two brands of semaglutide. These PBMs pretend they are covering part of the cost of the drug. But in fact, […]
October 20, 2024 — Headlines and health plans depict the demand for advanced obesity medicines in terms of mania or a stampede. “The Ozempic craze is booming in the United States,” says the University of Kentucky healthcare system. But is it reasonable to describe the people seeking these medicines as crazed? Or is this really an expression of false […]
October 3, 2024 — Late yesterday, FDA announced that Lilly’s tirzepatide shortage is officially over. Both Mounjaro and Zepbound are fully available in all marketed strengths and dosage forms. “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has determined the shortage of tirzepatide injection, a glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) medication, has been resolved. Tirzepatide injection has been in shortage since 2022 […]
September 30, 2024 — The abrupt and immediate departure of Sima Sistani as CEO of Weight Watchers prompts us to ask: Is the diet industry dead? Weight Watchers grew from its origins in the early 1960s to become the iconic brand that dominated this field. For decades now, the popular impulse to reject diet culture has been growing. In […]
September 25, 2024 — This was definitely a textbook case of sitting in the hot seat. For more than two hours the CEO of Novo Nordisk, Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen, faced intense questions in the Senate HELP Committee about drug pricing for the company’s diabetes and obesity medicines. If you want a sense of the tone for the hearing, consider […]
