There's a mind-boggling market of un[der]studied and un[der]regulated substances for people who desire peak health and performance, many of whom refuse to engage in regular physical activity or a regular diet.
They don't seem to be any happier for it. If anything, they live at a higher and more diffused state of anxiety. I think it is rather sad.
HN, in particular, loves anything that allows them to discredit science (like the constant banging on about the replication crisis) and replace it with their own pet theory.
Even if you almost always end up paying the bill + 20% tip, Americans like the idea that they could not pay the tip if the service was bad.
The appearance of free action is appealing and preferable to being forced to pay the extra amount, even if you almost always pay the amount willingly anyway.
To assert that people are sad and anxious while not putting the effort to understand the people involved is such an intellectually lazy position to hold.
The first is collagen: I'd love to see Lowe's take on recent peer review which says boosting oral collagen does appear to show signs of improved joint pain and skin resilience. Obviously modulated through how protein deprived you are, but for older people, eating enough protein can be an issue: it's not rapidly absorbed so you need 3 squares a day to get to the higher numbers. Collagen powders and vitamin C (oj) at breakfast might kick start this.
The second contradictory point is that this entire thread makes me want to shout GELL MAN AMNESIA because it's an exercise in otherwise intelligent people who can distinguish between anecdata, their personal experience and some cold hard facts in their core field, but not when it's self injecting unknown chemicals from China bought off-script.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10180699/
It has a Mechanism section which explains that when collagen is digested, one of the products of that is Gly-Pro-Hyp, which is what has the effects. I don't think that conflicts anything in this post?
> Collagen powders
In that case if you're eating collagen powder you could be eating just regular protein powder then?
Overall I'm quite pleased with the effects and many of the properties of this treatment that people dislike are actually properties I was looking for. Essentially, for pharmacological interventions I want impermanent effects with a clear dose-response relationship and ideally minimal or no adaptation.
So the fact that people gain weight when they go off it and then lose weight again when they go on it was good. That meant it's fairly easily undoable. The fact that the more you take the more you lose also was pretty good to know though for the majority of the time I took less than any tested dose (and the effects were quite strong on those).
I did experience quite a bit of adaptation so I needed to up the dose until I was in the range tested by the end. I've been off it for a month now and been pretty much flat, but we've been traveling since I stopped and so a lot has changed (no more lifting, lots more eating, lots more walking).
Rough cost for the retatrutide is $1.25/mg.
Even with free healthcare that seems like a foolish place to save money when very widely used alternatives exist in the regulated market.
I owe my health to early adoption of experimental peptides, I have life long ME/CFS and there is no known treatment for this nor is there any on the horizon. At least they finally have a diagnostic test and know it's not psychosomatic but I could have told them that from day 1. Most doctors are not researchers and have little understanding on statistics instead preferring to rely on discrete classifications and simple decision tress. As someone with hEDS from TNXB I am a walking bag of symptoms and yet not a single doctor could figure it out. I had to research it myself which involved post-doc level textbooks and research journals. I came across the work done by Prof. Khavinson (USSR) and it did appear to me that peptides were incredibly under-explored. Given the poor quality of life with ME/CFS I was willing to take serious risks so previous trials were helpful to give an idea on dosing and lethality, I went through most of the research peptides one by one. I actually waited on semaglutide a bit because I suspected there was a small minority who would have hyper sensitivity and I both expected that to appear in the data, which it did, and I expected to have hypersensitivity, which I did. Others who were less careful ended up with pretty bad gastroenteritis. Semaglutide has been the most effective and with it and a few others I am largely able to lead a normal life. I was getting gray market from the US but now I get it direct from China.
This is a deeply unfair statement, and also a false dichotomy. Medical science is of course empiric. What you call "fundamentalism" is that compounds need to undergo a rigorous regiment of empiric testing before they are given to potentially millions of people. And no, it's not just because of Thalidomide. Many, many compounds fail clinical trials because of severe side effects, like liver toxicity, severe immune reactions or heart problems. Then there's of course increased risk of cancer, which can take many years to manifest itself empirically. You argue that you prefer living with these uncertainties rather than ME/CFS, and that's of course entirely understandable, but disparaging the field of medical science as focused on "fundamentalism" because we do not give large patient cohorts untested compounds is polemic. I understand where you are coming from, and I'm sorry that you suffer from this terrible condition, but likewise, you should try to understand the other side.
Also I don't understand how semaglutide did help you while you're at the same time part of a minority risk group with a hypersensitivity to it. Isn't that a contradiction?
I had an ME/CFS patient that had tried 100s of things and documented the effects thoroughly. She had a quite impressive list. Roughly 30% had had an effect to begin with, but the trend she observed was that it lasted for around a month at most. Placebo was her overall conclusion, but she occasionally got relief anyways so we both agreed that there was no harm in continuing. I'm sure several "peptides" is on her list by now.
There is nothing new under the sun, and fad cures for diffuse conditions have come and gone many times before. This is especially the case for conditions involving pain or tiredness, which are extremely sensitive to both placebo and nocebo.
What would be revolutionary would be 2-3 double blinded RCTs showing a lasting effect. Which would be great if someone did! But you have to actually bother to do it. And personally I would put money on the outcome being "no effect".
> Peptides are a revolution and you don't need to know how they work to know that they work
Doctors, at least 15 years ago, were definitely bad at statistics.
They were not required to take a statistics course at all. Most programs would require Algebra and Calculus as part of their science reqs.
Some would maybe take one basic research course, and they would then become obsessed with p values of 0.05.
They did not have a basic understanding of how to interpret research unless they were an auto didactic and went out of their way to improve. It's something my director (a doctor and software engineer), and the Dean complained about relentlessly.
Isn't one of the bigger problems with ChatGPT that it's much too supportive of whatever the human is talking about?
But it does require to know the bias that LLMs have ahead of testing this.
Crack is really moreish.
I would encourage everyone interested in peptides to read about the state of medical science before the establishment of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.
Welcome to the powerful world of the placebo
Bench 1rm: 315
Squat: 5x10 225
Deadlift: 5x5 315
After: same height lol, 154lb
Bench 1rm: 285
Squat: 5x10 205
Deadlift: 5x5 275
Suffered some anhedonia towards the end but that went away ~1wk after stopping. Overall pretty good, not any side effects. Definitely fixed my food craving problem. I didn't have a high intake of protein during the 10 weeks, so I suspect thats why I lost muscle mass :/
How did you actually feel? Disinterested in stuff, ennui, or other?
The synthesis of peptides uses some NASTY chemicals. I would be worried about lax manufacturer policies leading to contamination, even if one batch passes. The costs of FDA certification are the effect of that protection.
But whatever, this is the same attitude that people have against owning insurance. It is hard to recognize the cost of risk.
My gf is in medicine so she had a friend test it through their work.
Even drug addicts heat up the thing they inject so theyre actually safer than you can ever be. Dont inject things from China into your blood!
There must be an irony that it was Trumps crackdown on peptides, I presume to prop up his prescription company, that forced me to switch to Chinese supply. By doing it all at once it created a critical mass for that market.
How so? Is there a particular characteristic of the US that makes it so, or of the channels through which this is done? I get that in general it's impossible as with recreational drugs, but when you look at cocaine then at least to traffick it to most wealthy countries it takes a large amount of resources and is at high risk of getting caught. Which is why they're increasingly starting to use narco submarines. This greatly increases the price of the product. Why can't the same happen to peptide imports?
How did they test encapsulation? I thought the whole problem is your stomach acid breaking it down.
There's this company that offers free testing: https://finnrick.com/
Another popular testing company is https://janoshik.com
Some other useful resources: https://graymarket.substack.com/ and https://glp1forum.com/
There are a few subreddits as well.
FWIW, I never ended up buying any myself.
Where do you think Hims, Ro, Brello, or the rest get the APIs they sell to their customers? They get them from grey market suppliers in China. They don't go to Ely Lilly or NovoNordisk and say, "politely sir, may I skirt around your IP and sell your drugs for 10x what they cost instead of 10,000x what they cost?" Hopefully, they test them and filter them and use sterile/pharma processes for what they sell to their customers. Well, except for the Medspas, those are just wild west snake oil farms.
Today ... who knows? It might just be the same gray market stuff us plebes can get.
Also, if you plan to be on it a good long time, you can buy a bunch of kits yourself (a kit is 10 vials), run a bunch of tests, and then just have a nice stockpile that will last you years. The testing will likely cost as much or more than the product itself, but given how inexpensive the product is, you still come out way ahead financially.
It is illegal, but it doesn't stop people from doing it. In fact, if you don't have any sort of test results for your peptides people will absolutely avoid buying your wares until you have them. Purity and mg/ml are the 2 basic test results that any shop worth their stuff will have.
After nearly getting hosed in a group buy (I did get refunded, but that is far from a guarantee) because of a product mismatch, I decided to just pay for nexaph. Love him or hate him, his popularity relies on his reputation and he has been more careful than most suppliers to cultivate it with more extensive testing and quality control.
<Insert that "one of us, one of us..." GIF here>
I know a bunch of people with multi-year stockpiles. I've got ~5 years of reta and ~6 years of tirz. This is too much, of course, but I determined a while back that under no circumstances do I ever intend to find myself unable to source it. My life is immeasurably better after losing 110 pounds.
At this point, broscience is considered no less valid than actual clinical trials, and the FDA should blame itself for this. Not "human nature being what it is in this fallen world" in a sort of general or abstract sense.
Another point I could raise is that telemedicine has turned the entire prescription system into nothing more than a parasitic middleman/gatekeeper.
FDA reform is very badly necessary. That ought to come before harsher enforcement, and I think that much of the populace already intuitively understands this.
1. Most people don't believe it anyway. People want to hear they can eat hamburgers and milkshakes and be healthy. Telling them "we know that gives you heart disease and cancer" does nothing.
2. Nutrition is complicated and different for every person, because everyone has different things they can tolerate. The "perfect" diet is actually worthless because it has a 0% success rate. Really, we have to optimize for how miserable people are willing to be.
3. Most people are unhealthy enough that nutrition is the least of their concerns. That sounds crazy, I know, but if you're obese (which most people are!), then priority is being not obese. Not your nutrition. I know those sound related but they're way less related than you think.
Maybe because so much of it is wrong, or (very charitably, as much is industry-biased) outdated?
Lifestyle modification is a definite challenge and I’m not dismissing it.
Still, hamburgers and milkshakes don’t give you heart disease and cancer. Overeating, oxidative stress from low-quality ingredients, etc might.
They absolutely do, particularly if you're getting most of your calories from them. If evidence-based medicine doesn't convince you, uh, hamburgers and supermarket milk tends to be processed.
Individual foods are—with some exceptions—neither bad for you nor good for you. A healthy diet can occasionally include doughnuts, and milkshakes. Your overall diet is what matters.
What? “Oxidative stress”? Oh come on, at least go full “seed oil” if we’re going to talk nonsense.
Seed oils are not as bad as painted but some caution is needed given for instance the industrial processes used to bring them to market sometimes. Plus the way the oils are cooked when they create free radicals. This is not nonsense.
In the drug division specifically, the number is about 75%.
And it shows on the research: e.g. does creatine help muscle building? No.[1] But cue some anecdote from someone where they also changed a dozen other things at the same time but are sure it was that.
[1] https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2025/03/sports-supplem...
[0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12665265/ - Meta analysis results; "after intervention, the Cr group exhibited significant strength gains"
[1]: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/17/17/2748 - "A total of 69 studies with 1937 participants were included for analysis. Creatine plus resistance training produced small but statistically significant improvements... when compared to the placebo."
And doctors are not dietitians.
Doctors in the US receive an average of under 20 hours of training in nutrition over four years of medical school. What little they do receive is often focused on nutrient deficiencies rather than on meal planning for health and chronic disease prevention. Less than 15% of residency programs include anything on nutrition.
To become a registered dietician requires at least a Master's degree in dietetics or nutrition or a related field, and at least 1000 hours of supervised internships.
PS: before any Europeans hold this up as an example of the poor US health care system, doctors in Europe average 24 hours of nutrition training.
Agree. Unless it's addictive or in short supply, you should be able to buy it OTC.
I’m curious what you mean by this. I’m not sure what you mean by “prescription system” specifically.
> https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/02/technology/ai-billion-dol...
People want GLP-1 drugs. They can't get them without a prescription. They pay $$$ to a "telemedicine" "doctor", recite a list of well-known symptoms, and buy the prescription.
The system is that you can't buy these drugs without the piece of paper, and the piece of paper is basically something that anybody can buy regardless of whether or not they actually need the drug. Wanting it is usually enough.
Also, most doctor's visits aren't any different from getting it if you want it except it's gated on the mood/attitude of the doctor, maybe your ability to sell some sob story. And then you book a different doctor until you get it. Telemedicine just makes the process easier an arbitrary system.
The prescription hurdle is absolutely necessary -- these are not drugs that anyone can safely take without guidance. It's the price that needs to be fixed.
You take a dose every two weeks. And if you accidentally double dose because you misread 1U to mean 1 dose, it just gives you some nausea.
Are we going to pretend it's hard to take this drug now too? Or that the doctor has some magical insight into your getting-on? Remember to eat. That's it. I guess a few people might need the doctor to go "you're eating, right?" but I don't believe in infantilizing everyone over that.
Weekly, if you are following guidelines correctly. The half-life of most GLP1 peptides is 5-6 days.
I otherwise agree with your point entirely. Though anecdotally, I may have given my brother-in-law a single small vial of tirzepatide at his request so that he could experience it, and the results were ... not good. Turns out he's an idiot, thought that 'more is better', 'drinking enough water is for weenies', and 'I am not an alcoholic even though I get plowed most evenings.' All against my very specific advice on how to give it a try. Whoops.
My fault, yes, I should have realized he was too stupid to do it without adult supervision. He made himself so sick he almost went to the ER. Nothing really dangerous, of course, tirzepatide is pretty safe stuff, but overdosing on it can make you feel very shitty for a few days until the blood concentration drops.
Additionally, getting the correct dose is not straightforward for a layperson as it is for other OTC drugs with standard doses.
I do think GLP-1s are just about right. It is appropriate to take them under personalized professional guidance.
Certainly you can abuse a GLP1 and get yourself very sick, or not abuse it and still end up with pancreatitis. But smoking and alcohol presumably cause way more cases of pancreatitis, and you don't need a script for a handle of Popov.
Indeed. In fact, I think just recently there were updated studies for at least one of the popular GLP1s that disclaimed entirely a link to pancreatitis.
Apparently we have forgotten people who died from eating disorders (previously called anorexia nervosa)?
There is a VAST difference between someone who weighs 300lbs asking for GLP-1 to combat morbidity and someone who is barely 100lbs asking for a GLP-1 to take off weight for bikini season. That's what needing to ask a doctor for a prescription is for.
You're totally missing the point thought. The prescription hurdle effectively does not exist. It's just a paywall.
You pay your $100, get a 3 minute call with a NP/PA/whomever, and basically the robot writes you a prescription for whatever you want. The point is you pay and you get the prescription. Patient safety has nothing to do with anything.
The advantage to a telehealth is not getting the prescription written -- it's that they'll fill it for cheap through a tiny compounding pharmacy that is making it, technically illegally, but are small enough to be off the FDAs enforcement radar for the moment.
It's slightly cheaper for me to use telehealth vs. billing through my insurance. The downside is it doesn't go towards my deductible of course.
The stuff you are describing are entire supply chains of a sort where you want a GLP-1 or perhaps a few other things like TRT. Those you are signing up for the drug itself, which happens to include the prescription part with it.
Telehealth can be used for any old medication you want. It removes the permission slip part of the process and replaces it with a payment gateway. If you have $75-150 you can just click some buttons and have a prescription for nearly anything you want at most a day later. This includes antibiotics, ADHD meds (getting harder on these), certain benzos, etc.
HIMS/HERS/etc. and their smaller ilk are super popular, but they are the tip of the iceberg.
Telehealth providers can certainly work with compounding pharmacies but not necessarily. If you are looking to get a prescription for Diazapam you are going to be getting that sent to your local Walgreens or whatnot.
How? Usually PCP visit are cheap and everyone gets one for free.
> HIMS/HERS/etc. and their smaller ilk are super popular, but they are the tip of the iceberg. > Telehealth providers can certainly work with compounding pharmacies but not necessarily.
Yeah I’m aware there are a whole host of services telehealths provide but the primary reason people use them for GLP1s is to avoid the name brand cost.
Due to drug advertising rules, the prescription system has been turned on its head, and the patient now goes to their doctor asking for a specific prescription.
Telemedicine took advantage of this and has effectively removed the middleman (the doctor) in many cases and you just sign-up look at a person on a camera, and get your drugs sent to you.
This is only true for a handful of drugs that are basically OTC already (or that have OTC formulations). Additionally, telemedicine didn’t take advantage of drug advertising- that’s an odd assertion.
If you can call up a teledoc and they give you a prescription based on your description why could you not just go buy the meds yourself without a prescription. You have essentially diagnosed yourself and just asked the doctor for permission to buy the drug you want.
It’s really clear that some of you are really mad about something you don’t understand.
In Mexico, for meds like mine, you can just buy them at the pharmacy. There's no reason for all this nonsense.
(Edit: same PCP refused to prescribe GLP-1s early, without any scientific or medical reason not to. Delayed my weightloss by months until I found a place that would.)
They basically operate as a "pay for a prescription" service.
Figure out what drug you want, google the drug name and telehealth. You will be marketed in a wink wink sort of manner over how easy it is to get them, just hours away! Then if you are not a total idiot, you answer certain questions in the right manner on the intake form, the doctor (usually NP/PA or similar for most things) will quickly run through that and expect you to answer correctly - perhaps guide you a bit if you don't.
5 minutes later you have a prescription in the web portal and it's sent to your pharmacy of choice.
It really shows how the whole "permission slip" program is BS. I've used these services a couple times vs. my normal doctor just to save time and expense of an office visit. If I can click some buttons, have a call 30 minutes later, and be on my way to the pharmacy for $50 it's sometimes the path I take now vs. traditional route.
Someone used to the traditional doctor/patient relationship thing and prescriptions being "holy" would be shocked at how easy and gamed it all is.
As for broscience, moving into peptides was a logical next step after exhausting anabolic steroid "research". In fact, I'd say that biohackers are actually behind the bros when it comes to trying various peptides out and documenting experiences.
As a side note more dangerous than any drug is stopping a prescription drug cold turkey. Watch what happens when global trade to/from China and India are cut off for a year. Attitudes will change.
This is briefly addressed in the article, but basically it's one thing to eat a peptide and quite another thing to inject it. Your digestive system is extremely adroit at taking peptides and proteins and breaking them down into individual amino acids, which are then absorbed via "transporters" in the gut. (e.g. SLC6A14 for glutamate and cysteine.)
If you eat insulin, absolutely nothing will happen. If you inject just a little bit too much, you're dead.
So, generally: Ingested proteins/peptides aren't drug-like, whereas they can be extremely potent drugs if administered via injection.
Granted, there are exceptions. If you accidentally get a drop of botox into your mouth, you'll be okay, but if you drink a vial, you'll be poisoned. And people have been trying to make orally-active peptides and proteins for decades, with some noteworthy successes, however few and far between in the general case.
GLP's are all the rage these days. Doctors seem to be giving GLP peptides out like candy and those are injected. People are looking like zombies. That said if doctors are going to be so liberal with them I should be able to buy it in the grocery store and slap it down on the conveyor belt. Again I can buy things far more dangerous than any prescription drug. There are very dangerous supplements, some that are shilled heavily on youtube. For example, Glycine (for me specifically used without a specific process) is more dangerous than heroine and the vast majority of doctors would have no idea what I am talking about.
Can you point to the clinical trials that demonstrate this?
> Doctors seem to be giving GLP peptides out like candy and those are injected.
There have been several _thousand_ clinical trials that have shown GLP-1s to be safe and effective.
Pretty much all venoms are mixes of short (10-15 base) peptide chains.
It's the naturalistic fallacy in an utterly perverse form ( and also goes to show why a regulatory system is good: the average person has no idea that they're dealing with or even common sense about it).
It’s also just a silly rhetorical technique. The ability to construct a grammatical sentence of that form does not constitute a valid argument.
“Restricting nuclear material is silly given that nearly all the stuff I interact with every day contains atomic nuclei.”
The reason we don't need tight regulations on bleach is because we don't have a societal issue causing people to drink it and hurt themselves... at least, not anymore: most of the locking lids on household cleaning chemicals are there by law.
That's like saying that since neither one nor zero requires regulation, neither does software. Maybe software does or doesn't, but in either case its best based on the nature of the aggregate, not the nature of its components.
That’s exactly what some biological drugs are too - peptides!
And peptides are just short chains of amino acids. Almost all the other biological drugs are just longer chains of amino acids - antibodies, enzymes, antigens, some hormones, and others.
Derek is right that the safety risks are exponentially higher when you inject peptides - you basically skip a bunch of protective mechanisms like enzymes that quickly break them down if taken orally or routes.
As a former R&D scientist there is no way I’d inject any peptide that hasn’t at least gone through a phase 1 safety study in humans. Otherwise you have no idea what it could be doing to your body.
A good example was a drug that was quickly pulled from market for causing fatal anaphylactic reactions. It wasn’t even caught in the clinical trials!
At the same time, I think people have the right to take whatever substance they want. But I worry a lot of people aren’t aware of the risks.
A lot of people do not understand the trial system or the value of Phase 0/1 tests when it comes to the substances that they put into their body. And thanks to the influencer/grifter/biohacker ecosystem that exists, more people would put their trust in accidental evidence, from people who's incentive it is to make money off of them, while complaining about the pharmaceutical industry operates off of a profit motive.
I mean, why regulate anything? Everything is just different arrangements of hydrogen and time. It's so weird that certain arrangements of hydrogen and time try to claim to have things like "morals", and try to force other arrangements of hydrogen and time to not do arbitrary contrived concepts like "murder".
All is one. Just hydrogen and time. Therefore everything should be legal.
This is a deeply weird take. You think anyone ought to be able to buy, for instance, warfarin and freely take it without a doctor’s involvement? We should let parents self-diagnose diabetes and administer insulin without a prescription or discussion? We should just hope that patients heard their doctor say hydralazine and not hydroxyzine?
> As a side note more dangerous than any drug is stopping a prescription drug cold turkey.
Abject nonsense. It was very easy to stop my prescribed amoxicillin. It’s clear you don’t have any actual idea what “prescription drugs” are, in aggregate, and that should maybe inform your decision to have Big Opinions about them.
Yes.
I don't. But the cost of access is significant. And with pharmacies in India, China and Mexico willing to ship basically anything into America, it's a purely-cosmetic tax now.
I guess I don’t hate everyone else enough to agree with that.
Weird examples. You can buy insulin without a prescription today in the USA.
In much of the world -- including almost all of Asia, Africa, and much of Eastern Europe -- you can buy almost any drug without a prescription. The only exceptions are potent CNS stimulants or narcotics, and in some rare cases antibiotics.
This is legitimately a better system. Takes out the middleman.
In the US you can get any drug if you pay $120 and recite the magic words to a telemedicine "doctor."
Doctors in the US get a nice $200 to $500 per doctors visit, required to extend the prescription drug. I only notice because I pay cash. This is why they will argue against anything I am saying until they are code-blue in the face. I will leave them with my code brown.
In the US you can get any drug if you pay $120 and recite the magic words to a telemedicine "doctor."
That's how a number of us in a particular circle stock up on anti-biotics. That said anti-biotics are a last resort for me whereas I find doctors are quick to prescribe them.
Ok, and? At worst you waste a couple hundred dollars and deem the alternative therapy not worth it and go back to your doctor but I know dozens of people at my gym that used BPC 157 and TB 500 that fixed their chronic tendon/joint issues within weeks of starting the therapy that physios couldn't fix for years.
I don't think I even know dozens of people, full stop, let alone well enough to talk to them about their peptide use.
They shouldn't be. If someone has chronic tendon or joint issues, that's something to discuss with a doctor and a trainer.
I am a super introvert and know at least half a dozen folks with such issues, more if you include my close friend group.
Any place that has a lot of physically active people stressing their limits a bit is going to have a lot of injured folks over a decent period of time. And of course it gets talked about quite a lot, since it limits performance and ability.
My trainer knows I have a chronic shoulder issue, and an adductor issue at the moment I'm working through that we need to avoid stressing too much. The few other folks who tend to work out around my schedule know of this, and I know of theirs.
Not very uncommon really.
At worst you inject unknown substances into your bloodstream that could do more or less anything.
I'm very on the fence over BPC-157/TB500, I really want to see some actual clinical trials ran on it. I have a feeling the effects are overstated, but I also have had a number of "insider" conversations where I know these and other compounds are very much being utilized in pro athlete injury recovery programs. Those athletes certainly are getting state of the art medical care via traditional sources, plus elite level physio therapy - so it's hard to say if the illicit injury recovery drugs are doing much or not.
According to our new AI overlords, a short synopsis of potential risks of BPC 157 based on mechanistic and animal work to date (don't know human risks because there haven't been sufficient clinical studies):
* Possible pathologic angiogenesis (abnormal blood‑vessel growth), which theoretically could support tumor growth or inflammatory and autoimmune processes. * Modulation of nitric‑oxide pathways that, at high levels, might contribute to anemia, altered drug metabolism (CYP enzyme activity), and possibly neurodegenerative processes in theory. * Concerns that its pro‑healing, pro‑growth signalling (e.g., FAK–paxillin) could encourage cancer spread if malignant cells are already present; this remains theoretical, with no proof in humans. * Possible liver and kidney toxicity suggested in some commentary and extrapolated from preclinical work, but not well characterized in people. * Immune reactions or allergic responses, including fevers, rash, hives, muscle aches, or systemic inflammatory responses
These do not appear to be results that would appear overnight. It would be "nice" if the folks injecting random shit into their bodies also disclaimed any subsequent medical intervention as a result of said shit, but that I suspect that's unlikely.
People for so upset that GLP-1 has no long term side effects.
There's still the crowd completely sure everyone will get HyperCancer in 10 years or something (they won't).
We do not have robust clinical data for things like BPC-157 but we do have strong preclinical data and an understanding of the mechanisms in play.
I use BPC-157/TB-500/Ghk-CU/KPV - so I'm certainly OK taking the risks. But those mechanisms mentioned before? The same things we're counting on for healing and inflammation reduction are the same things that we know can cause an increase in tumor growth rate and chance of metastasizing. VEGF/VEGFR2 expression are even suppression targets for some cancer therapies.
Are there powerful and useful medications out there, available today, that we both don't have good scientific data on and are free enough of serious side effects? For sure! Is everything out there that, though? No. Some things that work will have too serious of a side effect profile to be feasible. Some things won't work at all, despite however much anecdata is out there.
As for the general idea... I agree there's no law that says a medicine with a strong positive effect must also have strong side effects. And we have plenty that don't - statins, particularly the latest generation, like pitavastatin, are effectively side effect free for the hugely overwhelming majority of people and have great lipid lowering effects. Even older ones showed extremely minimal incidents of things like muscle pain - a vanishingly small number of people relative to the total amount on the medications report muscle pain, and when investigated, quite a lot of even that ends up being unrelated to the statins. Yet the narrative persists that make it sound like anyone on statins is going to have their muscles ache 24/7
It seems to be like treating alcoholism with disulfiram: it's a miracle in clinical trials but in the real world the patients just lower the doses or discontinue treatment after 1-2 years and go back to their old habits.
This is one of the wildest claims I have ever seen on this website.
Would you claim insulin is ineffective outside of clinical trials for treating type 1 diabetes because people have to keep injecting it?
Type 1 diabetes (or majority of diseases) doesn't involve addiction.
This is totally false. I know a number of people who took GLP-1 to treat their obesity and then stopped and have stayed not obese.
> In my friends, all of them stopped taking GLP-1 drugs within 2 years because all of them lost the weight they wanted to. Out of curiosity, what sources lead you to believe this?
Anecdotes like this are interesting but in medicine they are not sufficient to make factual statements about drugs. In meta-analyses there is weight regain which is steeper as more weight is lost during treatment [1].
The weight regain seems to be rather slow, it can take years until the baseline weight is reached.
What does "steeper" mean? The studies I've seen show a net weight loss, even after regain, for the median patient.
> The weight regain seems to be rather slow, it can take years until the baseline weight is reached
Maybe. Right now, however, the evidence shows solid effects outside clinical settings. Your original statement was wrong–your sources own refute the claim.
If you're arguing the effects in the real world haven't consistently been as ridiculous as they were in clinical trials, sure, you get a brownie point. But broadly speaking, these drugs are terrifically effective, both when taken for life and when taken intermittently.
This study found that 84.4% non-diabetic patients stop taking GLP-1 drugs within two years. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
Do you have a source for this "lack of real-world efficacy"?
> This study found that 84.4% non-diabetic patients stop taking GLP-1 drugs within two years
"With a with a median on-treatment weight change of −2.9%" [1]. Of those who discontinued and experienced "weight gain since discontinuation," they were "associated with an increased likelihood of GLP-1 RA reinitiation."
I'm genuinely struggling to see how this source shows real world inefficacy. In my friends, all of them stopped taking GLP-1 drugs within 2 years because all of them lost the weight they wanted to.
Out of curiosity, what sources lead you to believe this?
> it's like the drug disulfiram
Have clinicians made this connection?
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
This feels new. I thought the methylene-blue-for-cancer types continued their medicine while taking other things as extras.
Personally, I've swung over to the laissez-faire side of medicine. At the end of the day, if you're an adult, it's your body. You should be given the chance to educate yourself. But if you want to inject yourself with a prion, like, go for it. Maybe you won't fuck up your own research.
(Marketing should be tightly regulated, possibly banned.)
Chesterton’s Fence rears its ugly head again. This is the same thing as vaccine skepticism (those diseases can’t be that bad, I never hear about them killing anyone these days) applied to a different context
Arguing for modern reforms is one thing, but there’s a reason we have the FDA. Statistically, most individuals do not have the medical expertise or the desire or ability to wade through enough clinical data to make these sorts of decisions with any hope of good outcomes, particularly in the face of an entire Internet of people trying to push questionable substances on them.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/why-are-people...
So, it is not just chemist but molecular biologist too. And the above is also not entirely correct. Yes, the author refers to size as threshold, before something is called a "protein". But the term protein has additional meanings that a peptide does not automatically have. For instance, a protein typically has a specific 3D conformation. It may be "sticky" after degradation or unfolding, but for the most part a protein is something with a 3D structure. A peptide does not necessarily imply the same. A protein may also have several polypeptide chains - insulin is a simple example for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin#Structure (A and B chain)
> So the number of different possible peptides is just ridiculously huge.
That's no surprise either - that's due to the code used. You add to the code, so of course length plays a role, as does the variety. There is a DNA->aminoacid mapping. The first has four possibilities per slot; the latter 20 (or more if you include e. g. selenocystein or pyrrolysine; and you have various post-translational modifications too, so you have more variety per slot).
> For comparison, it has been about ten trillion seconds since Homo sapiens emerged as a separate species.
The whole species concept is IMO outdated. It was created before people knew that DNA codes for the complexity in pretty much any species (excluding RNA viruses but they have reverse transcriptase, at the least some viruses, so ultimately RNA->DNA).
> The other one (by Sarah Hood) relates all this to RFJ Jr.’s advocacy. The flip side of “the government shouldn’t be able to force me to vaccinate my kids” is “I should have the right to take whatever medicines I want to without the government getting in my way”.
I don't see why that would be questionable. Would people do as Trump tells them to do? I would not. If you see Trump as a lobbyist, how many private interests may his government have? If they have a commercial interest then their statements may be biased.
> You don’t have an LC/MS or an NMR machine in your garage, so you can’t be sure what it is you’re really injecting
Right, so the whole system depends on trust. This is already a problem because you have to trust not only the government but ALL who were involved in scientific publishing. There were lies told in science too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retraction_in_academic_publish...
Dealing with doctors is kind of a pain in the ass. I was very sick a month ago and my doctor is pretty "anti antibiotics", he wanted me to go over for an in person check-in. This was after 10 days of having symptoms that I did everything reasonable to take care of. I got on a call with another doctor (at a perfectly reputable hospital) who immediately prescribed antibiotics. It took 5 days of antibiotics just to feel somewhat better - all while using saline rinses, showering, sleeping, eating properly, etc. I still have a lingering cough. I am very reluctant to take antibiotics unless it really feels necessary, this was easily the worst sinus infection of my adult life.
My friend wanted to try out a weight loss medication. Their doctor refused because they felt that my friend hadn't tried hard enough without it. So they got some from another friend who hadn't ended their prescription because they also were worried of being cut off. They've lost weight, which has motivated them to exercise more, eat better, and are generally happier and healthier.
From the article,
> Unfortunately, point two is that we barely have any of these effects worked out - at least not to the degree that you would want before you start injecting them into your leg.
This is what was said to a friend whose doctor took them off of one of those GLP medications, basically. They didn't have enough evidence to know the risks of continued use, even at lower doses.
The reality is simply that there's a big gap right now between what people want and what people have access to. The supplement industry exists to fill that gap.
Medical professionals can complain about users taking these peptides, but plenty of people are not "anti medicine" while still feeling underserved. If doctors aren't in a position to have these conversations, people will go to Youtube or wherever else to look for answers.
Personally, I have mixed feelings about a number of medications requiring a prescription. I frankly do not see why my doctor is involved in me taking a drug unless it would be negligent to allow me to or if it would have community health impacts (ie: antibiotic resistant strains etc). I'm an adult, if I've been properly informed of risks, etc, then I'm inclined to say that it should be up to me to pay full price for some medication or not.
I know plenty of people getting their GLP1 from compound pharmacies. None of them went their first, their doctors wouldn't give them the medication (sometimes they were just a pound under the BMI limit, often because they had been slowly losing weight) so they went elsewhere. These aren't anti-vaxxers who won't take their medication, they're people who want help and there's a gap that companies are taking advantage of. The medical establishment needs to find a way to address that. Right now the answer appears to be compound pharmacies and nurse practitioners.
> In my own view (and it ain’t just me) you also have regulatory agencies to force people to show that their drugs actually have some benefit before they can sell them, too. But that’s going further and further out of fashion. Can’t get ahold of the New Hotness to inject into your upper thigh if there are a bunch of stick-in-the-mud folks asking for human data, infringing on your freedom and all.
Many of us will be dead before there's a medically approved treatment for something. Hell, I got eye surgery before it was FDA approved - I'd probably be blind (or at least far worse off) if I'd waited the years it took.
How many people taking supplements are "naturopaths" who reject modern medicine as opposed to just people who want to be healthier? I really wonder that.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/endocrinology/comments/1jb2cce/grow...