What Happens When A Prescription Medication Goes Viral?
Date posted:
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The most restrictive part of marketing in the wider life sciences industry is medication, for many important safety reasons.
The Advertising Standards Agency’s guidelines for marketing medication only available on prescription, Section 12.12, succinctly notes that prescription-only medication cannot be advertised to the public.
This is an essential part of measures to avoid overprescribing medications that may not be suitable for a particular treatment, and the lack of such measures in countries such as the United States has notable and documented implications.
However, due to the international effect of social media and the ultimate inability to contain viral posts and trends to a single relevant country, questions surrounding the implications, conflicts of interest and potential harm that could be caused to patients started to be asked around Ozempic.
A brand name for semaglutide, Ozempic was a medication produced by Novo Nordisk for the treatment of type 2 diabetes that increased insulin production but also decreased appetite as a side effect of its operating function.
This made it not only an effective and popular treatment for diabetes since it only needed to be injected weekly rather than daily but was also prescribed off-label as a weight loss treatment.
Rumours surrounding celebrity weight loss and a special by Oprah Winfrey led to a prescription medicine receiving a level of cultural virality that is otherwise extremely difficult to buy, but it also had major cultural and healthcare side effects.
The first was that, given Ozempic was not a weight loss medication and Novo Nordisk was not entirely ready for the spike in demand, shortages were rampant, as people in the United States who could afford the off-label prices bought it at a rapid rate.
This led to the development of WeGovy, a semaglutide product designed with weight loss in mind, but the cultural impact of Ozempic specifically has proven difficult to reverse, and there are still people ordering a diabetes medication for weight loss instead of one using the same active ingredient designed with it in mind.