As drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy keep flying off pharmacy shelves, more and more patients are ignoring manufacturers' and medical professionals' instructions by "microdosing" it.
As the New York Times reports, doctors are intrigued — if not concerned — by the rise in the practice of taking lower doses of weight-loss injectables like semaglutide, especially when it comes to those who say it works to help them lose and keep off weight while minimizing side effects and saving money.
"There’s this desire for ultra-personalization," Andrew Kraftson, a Michigan Medicine clinical associate professor, told the newspaper. "I can understand that and affirm it. But we don’t have guidance to tell people to do microdosing on their own."
There are plenty of reasons to want to take lower doses of these drugs, which belong to a class of medications called glucagon-like peptide-1 inhibitors or agonists (GLP-1s) that are believed to mimic the gut's feeling of fullness. The main rationales, however, seem to be a desire to avoid side effects or to keep off weight previously lost on a full dose — nevermind slashing the drugs' astonishing monthly costs.
Because such off-label usages aren't tracked, we can't say for sure how many people are microdosing Ozempic — but given that influencers are preaching the practice's benefits and even selling expensive "courses" on how to hack their dosages, an uptick is clearly upon us.
Indeed, when we ran "microdosing Ozempic" through a Google Trends keyword analysis, it's clear that there've been massive spikes in interest compared to a year ago.
Among the practice's earliest adopters is Michael Hammer, a 47-year-old who was prescribed Ozempic years ago and who told the NYT that he had gotten very nauseous from his regular-sized dose, which begins at 0.25 milligrams once per week before titrating up to 0.5 mg after a month.
Hammer said he was ready to "give it up" instead of getting sick when he reached out to Calibrate, the telehealth firm he got his original prescription through. An employee there told him he should try microdosing it in 2022, and he did. Today, he's pretty happy with the 50 pounds he's lost over the past few years by increasing his exercise and dieting with the help of the drug's hunger-suppressing effects — although it still makes him a little queasy, he reports.
In an email to the NYT, Calibrate executive Sarah Baker said "microdosing has been utilized as a strategy to mitigate" such side effects, which are "well-documented" throughout the industry. Though she's correct on the latter half, there's a vacuum of data to support the former — though according to Daniel Drucker, one of the first doctors to study GLP-1s, it's probably not harmful in the long run.
"I’m not concerned that they’re going to grow three arms, or have something horrible happen to them," the Mount Sinai Hospital Toronto researcher said.
As the NYT notes, those who do lose or keep weight off with GLP-1 microdoses could be considered "super responders" to the drugs. Until there's more research into the practice, however, it's impossible to say for sure how or why it works for them — especially because doctors only kind of know Ozempic works in the first place.
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