Probably due to the influence of wellness influencers, a new trend of weight loss treatment is booming. These methods save the obese person the trouble of hitting the gym or having regular early morning jogs.
The treatment involves taking diabetes medication like Wegovy and Ozempic. Unfortunately, most people who are taking these drugs for weight loss are reporting several complications and side effects.
So much so that lawsuits are piling up against the creator of those three drugs. The common narrative is that the producer of the drugs did not disclose the potential risks of taking them.
Wegovy and Ozempic are both products of Novo Nordisk. However, it was created strictly as a prescription drug for the treatment of diabetes. Nonetheless, when some physicians realized it triggered weight loss in most of their patients, they started prescribing it for overweight people.
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As far as lawsuits are concerned, Novo Nordisk is not alone. Eli Lily is another pharmaceutical company that produces a drug called Mounjaro for treating diabetes. Like Novo Nordisk’s formulations, Mounjaro equally aids weight loss but also comes with terrible side effects.
To see how the side effects developed, we need to understand how these three products bring about weight loss. First off, some components of the drug act like native hormones that let the brain know when the stomach is full. So, with these weight loss medications, you feel full, even on an empty stomach.
Likewise, the drug slows down digestion, causing the body to hold food for longer before letting it out. These induced effects naturally brought about significant weight loss in the patients. However, there were some non-disclosed side effects, too.
Due to these alterations in the natural process of human metabolism, most of the drug users came down with gastroparesis. Gastroparesis is a paralysis of the stomach that comes with symptoms like nausea, vomiting, constipation, diarrhea, and excruciating pain.
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In an extreme instance of complication, a user of Ozempic landed in the ICU after just a few weeks of using the prescription drug. Brea Hand, a 23-year-old mother of two, ended up spending several days recovering from the complications. As you must have guessed, Hand is one of the droves of people suing Novo Nordisk.
Hand’s case seems to be the mildest of them all, as several other people had to undergo invasive surgeries. Some had their gallbladders removed, while some had their stomach itself operated upon. There are cases of people who would live with life-long complications due to the treatment of the side effects.
Interestingly, most plaintiffs in the lawsuits against the two pharmaceutical companies are women. So far, there are over 40 active lawsuits against Novo Nordisk and Eli Lily.
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It is difficult to hold the physicians who prescribed the drugs responsible. Their confidence came from the knowledge that the FDA approved the three drugs. Likewise, clinical trials also showed the effectiveness of the drugs in treating diabetes and obesity. However, the side pharmaceutical companies did not explicitly declare the accompanying side effects.
Another booster for the sales of these drugs is the recent endorsement by public figures. For example, Elon Musk and Sharon Obourne publicly claimed that Ozempic helped them shed some weight.
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