TikTok Influencers Are Now Treating Ozempic Side Effects

Every day dozens of people come to Jennifer Witherspoon—a former dental office manager with zero medical training—for help managing nausea, headaches, and other side effects that can come with taking weight-loss shots. She even crafted a template response to help her quickly get through the messages. “People have offered to pay me, begged me to start a podcast, asked me to call their sisters-in-law, wanted me to call their doctor,” she said. “One lady even invited me to her wedding.” Even Oprah’s production company reached out to feature one of her videos in a prime time special. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] What makes Witherspoon’s advice so appealing? It’s filling a void. As a Mounjaro user herself, Witherspoon figured out ways to minimize her own side effects, absent guidance from the doctor who prescribed her the drug. In August 2022, she started sharing that wisdom on TikTok with hundreds of thousands of others.  “I’m known as, like, the side effect girl,” she said. Influencers have found an audience desperate for information. As demand for GLP-1 drugs that cause weight loss, such as Novo Nordisk A/S’s Ozempic and Eli Lilly & Co.’s Mounjaro, explodes, more people are getting them from sources that offer little or no follow-up care. More than half of the several dozen U.S. telehealth companies that offer GLP-1s launched after Ozempic came to mar...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate wire Source Type: news