Tummy troubles are a common side effect of the modern, wondrous weight-loss phenomenon that is GLP-1 medications. Unfortunately for one man who overdosed on an experimental, extremely powerful obesity drug, his guts went into a full-on meltdown, causing violent, painful diarrhea that had him sprinting to the bathroom several times a day.
The whole nightmare was documented in a scientific case report later published in the Annals of Internal Medicine Clinical Cases. The story was first brought to our attention by Gizmodo.
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According to the report, written by internist Opeyemi Komolafe of the Medical University of South Carolina’s Marion Medical Center, the 32-year-old man had been injecting himself with retatrutide, an experimental obesity medication currently being developed by Eli Lilly. Retatrutide belongs to the same family as Ozempic and Wegovy, but it’s even more intense.
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The guy had apparently bought the drug online, outside of the purview of a doctor or an insurance company. He was already taking 20 milligrams weekly. That’s a dose significantly higher than what has been tested in clinical trials…and then he accidentally doubled up on the dose after forgetting he had already injected himself the day before. Now he had 40 milligrams of the stuff in his system.
He was crapping his brains out just a few hours later. And then it kept going. But when he showed up at the emergency room, he was having bowel movements every 20 to 30 minutes, and had as many as 30 bowel movements a day, along with intense abdominal cramps, nausea, dehydration, and acute kidney injury.
It took a four-day hospital visit for the doctors to team him recovered. There wasn’t much they could do for them other than treat the symptoms. They kept him hydrated and pumped him full of all the nutrients that were rapidly firing out of him. He was finally discharged, having hopefully learned a valuable lesson about overdosing on experimental medications that he shouldn’t even have been taking in the first place.
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