‘It changed my life’: Ozempic patient shares her good, bad and scary side effects

globalnews.ca:

For Edmonton native Susanne Brown, Ozempic has been life-changing. After being prescribed the drug, she climbs mountains, she’s training for a 10-kilometre run, and she’s ziplined through tropical forests in Mexico and swum in cenotes.

“I do whatever I want because I can,” she says. “It has changed my life completely. It’s taken the fear out of everything that I do physically.”

But Brown wasn’t prescribed Ozempic for its on-label use as a Type 2 diabetes treatment; she takes it off-label, for obesity. She’s certainly not the only Canadian to do so, but it can be difficult for people with obesity to speak publicly about using the drug to manage weight.

Ozempic crashed into mainstream consciousness early this year, as shortages of the drug in the U.S. and Australia led to media narratives that people abusing the drug to lose weight were keeping it out of the hands of people with diabetes who need it most.

But this account leaves out the growing number of people who take Ozempic to lose weight under informed doctors’ orders, to prevent heart disease and diabetes, address chronic pain and in some cases live healthier, more capable lives.

And while people love to speculate who in Hollywood might be taking the drug, those before-and-after pictures conceal the truth: that Ozempic is not some miracle cure for weight loss.

For Brown, losing weight on Ozempic came with major downsides — but the downsides were worth it for her for managing her obesity, a chronic condition that she will likely struggle with for the rest of her life. Not to mention a fringe benefit: she feels society treats her better now that she lives in a smaller body.

Misconceptions about Ozempic abound, and they often go hand in hand with misconceptions about