It is a trend rooted in profit-making. Adverts featuring prescription-only weight-loss medications are splashed across the internet – and it is causing concern among experts.
But the question remains: who is driving the boom?
Consider drugs for other conditions, be it asthma or high blood pressure: a quick internet search might throw up a couple of online pharmacies, but not page after page of results offering discount codes for consultations, special offers for returning customers or money-off emails.
Yet when it comes to weight-loss jabs, it is a different story.
Boots offers returning customers 10% off each time they reorder a weight-loss treatment – a promotion that appears at the bottom of a page featuring Wegovy, Mounjaro and other prescription-only medications.
The online firm Pharmacy2U lists the prices of medications including Wegovy and Mounjaro together with a promotional code entitling customers to £40 off their first four weeks’ supply.
Taking a different approach, Daily Chemist is emailing £25 credits for weight-loss orders to customers, with a link that takes them directly to prescription-only weight loss medications. Such emails have been sent to people who have previously informed the pharmacy they have a healthy weight.
A Boots spokesperson said promotional activity for Boots Online Doctor services was also compliant with applicable legislation, MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) guidance and ASA advertising codes.
“All Boots Online Doctor prices are for the full service – from the online consultation to aftercare and support – and not for prescription medicines alone,” they said.
“Weight-loss treatment is most effective when used consistently, alongside important lifestyle changes. We offer 10% off the Boots Online Doctor weight-loss service for returning patients to encourage them to stay with us to receive continuity of care.”
A spokesperson for Pharmacy2U said: “Any discounts offered as part of our private online doctor service adhere to the guidelines set out by GPhC [General Pharmaceutical Council] and MHRA and are solely in relation to the provision of the service by our highly qualified clinicians. Patients have the ability to ask our GPs for a treatment recommendation as part of the consultation.”
Daily Chemist did not respond to a request for comment. The MHRA and ASA said they would assess the adverts to decide if they merited investigation.
In each of these cases, the cited webpage was just one click away from the homepage of the online pharmacy, apparently contradicting advice set out by the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA).
“Marketers should ensure that the casually browsing consumer does not come across information relating POMs with ease,” the ASA says in its advice on “Prescription-only Medicines (websites)”.
Dr Piotr Ozieranski, from the University of Bath, who researches the political sociology of medicine and pharmaceuticals, said concerns were not confined to public-facing marketing, with Novo Nordisk – the pharmaceutical company behind Saxenda, Ozempic and Wegovy – having previously been in trouble for its practices.
Indeed Novo Noridsk was suspended from the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry in 2023 for actions including sponsoring biased training to healthcare professionals around Saxenda, and offering individual health professionals a patient group direction (PGD) that would allow them to give the drug without a prescription from a doctor or other prescriber – a move that was deemed an inducement to prescribe.
However, insiders in the pharmaceutical industry have stressed adverts featuring prescription-only weight-loss medications are not being driven by the pharmaceutical industry noting, the demand is already sky-high.
Instead, it seems, it is an approach taken by the pharmacies themselves.
The financial gains for pharmacies offering the weight-loss jabs are phenomenal: a month’s supply costs a patient about £150 for the lowest dose, rising to about £250 a month for the highest.
With about 60% of the UK’s population living with obesity or overweight, and the jabs requiring ongoing use for weight loss to be maintained, industry insiders told the Guardian the medications could make pharmacies hundreds of thousands of pounds a year.
Ozieranski notes the company Pharmadoctor, which sells clinical service packages to pharmacists, has an online calculator that pharmacists can use to estimate the profits they could make.
The upshot is that weight-loss medications are an attractive prospect for online businesses and bricks-and-mortar pharmacies that are already struggling to remain open.
However, Ozieranski says it is the pharmaceutical companies that have created a parallel private market for such medications, while Prof Simon Capewell of the University of Liverpool, noted pharmaceutical companies gained financially from advertisements of the drugs.
“Anything that’s going to promote visibility, promote acceptability, promote normality of this [type of] drug has got to be positive for the pharmaceutical companies,” Capewell said.
