It's unusual for a medication to become a household name; even more uncommon for its branding to become, like Advil, shorthand for an entire class of products; and rarest of all, for it to change not just U.S. medicine, but U.S. culture. Ozempic has done all three.
Approved in 2017 as a Type 2 diabetes medication, Ozempic has largely made its name and a fortune for its manufacturer, Novo Nordisk-as a weight-loss aid. Its runaway success mirrors that of similar medications, including Eli Lilly's Mounjaro and Wegovy, another Novo Nordisk product and the only one in the trio technically approved for weight loss. Prescriptions for all of them are flying off the pad at an eye-popping rate: they're up 300% since early 2020, with more than 9 million written in the U.S. in the last three months of 2022 alone, according to health-care-industry research firm Trilliant Health. Demand is so great that there have been shortages of all three drugs, with some diabetes patients struggling to fill their prescriptions as they compete for limited supplies.
Plenty of physicians (and pharmaceutical executives who stand to get very, very rich) say this frenzy is a good thing, given that roughly three-quarters of U.S. adults qualify as either overweight or obese and are thus, according to leading public-health authorities, at risk of a range of serious health complications. "Obesity is an epidemic, and we urgently need effective treatments," says Dr. Sahar Takkouche, an obesity and bariatric medicine specialist at Vanderbilt Health. But others are uneasy about the age of Ozempic, which can feel like a return to an era when thinness was unquestioningly valued.
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