Kamal Ghorui
Regulators can’t be MIA as people buy weight-loss drugs off the internet, including from China
Many have a big medical need, others are merely driven by vanity.
Either way, Indians are racing at predictable pace towards the ‘magic pills’ they have heard so much about, that could thin them without the ‘bitter pills’ of diet and exercise.
It’s helped that Novo Nordisk lost the patent for Semaglutide, the most used GLP-1 drug, in India in March. Brands have slashed prices, generics have started rolling out excitedly.
And yet, as a TOI story highlighted yesterday, there are people choosing a third, dangerous alternative to the branded and generic meds. They are ingesting untested, unregulated drugs from China.
This can be about chasing the lowest-priced option. Or going DIY, instead of following doctor’s orders.
Or even buying hooey and hogwash, from some social media influencer. Content creators can be highly irresponsible launch monkeys.
Sometimes, out of greed, and other times, because they don’t know any better.
Whatever the reason, medically unsupervised use of drugs that alter core metabolic signals inside the human body, is a mug’s game. Laypersons have no idea if these meds interfere with the others they are taking. How to dose up and dose down are also highly technical matters.
The Chinese in-vitro drugs circulating in India, through the internet, need to be a wake-up call. This is what happens when doctors’ prescriptions are replaced by an influencer’s testimonial, and the pharmacy by Instagram DMs.
Yes, NFHS-5 data indicates that around a quarter of both women and men in India, are either overweight or obese. In a way, we got here because of being bad at science, paying a heavy price for poor literacy in both nutrition and biology.
This has, of course, been a failure of regulators, too. They really have to figure out how to stop the GLP-1 revolution from being captured by celeb tubers and muckamucks, bent on shooting scientific illiteracy to even more treacherous highs.
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