“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,” Dani Blum writes over at The New York Times. “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.” Dani Blum, “More People Are Overdosing on Ozempic Alternatives,” The New York Times.
