Skimming the article, I see:
The doctors prescribing this stuff seem to be attached to private clinics. That strongly suggests that there’s a money trail somewhere.
A safety study (described by the article as “small”) of this stuff in humans was done by someone at some point, so it’s probably not outright poison, although rarer, long-term, or high-dose effects may have been missed. As long as it’s safe, and not being used as an excuse not to seek out treatment for a serious condition, I’m fine with dumbass gym-rats wasting their money on it, but a larger safety study would be wise.
If there’s a loophole in the law that’s allowing this, yeah, we should close it before someone uses it to prescribe something that is outright poison.
Having seen some drug submissions from actual pharma companies, especially ones that have polypeptides such as this one, so much work has to go into the safety of them.
Depending on how they’re made (synthetic, semi-synthetic, or biologically made) a large number of impurities can be in there. All of those need to be examined to see if they’re dangerous. Not to mention the possibility of microbial growth in the drug.
That’s just one aspect of how these may be dangerous. Even the glass bottle and cap are regulated for injectable drugs to check for interactions and such.
It seems like little to none of this (and many more aspects of drug safety) have been looked at for these. These doctors should lose their licenses for this (I don’t recall the article talking about repercussions for the doctors).
I’m also curious about the financial incentives for the prescribing doctors. Are they receiving external incentives (e.g., from people in fitness industry to promote this non-medicine to patients)? Internally to their practice, do they give patients 2 weeks of pills per appointment and see them twice monthly on an ongoing basis despite no ongoing medical issue?
The other issues are 1) These quack MDs undermine trust in healthcare expertise and our healthcare system by practicing non-evidenced-based medicine (and these are now major societal issues; eg declining immunization rates, return of previously extirpated bugs like measles, decreasing rates of newborn vitamin K injections, CDC website now saying autism might be linked to vaccines) and 2) these charlatans are likely billing provincial health care for some of these bogus services
