 Hey guys, this is Dr. Ahmed Ergen. I'm an endocrinologist and a diabetes educator. Today we are talking about WeGoV. WeGoV. So this is a new weight loss drug, but here's a trick. It's the same molecule as a diabetes drug. Let's talk about it. Now, hi guys. Thank you for watching quickly. I have a quiz for you in the description below. So after you watch this video, take the quiz, answer the questions, the more questions you answer correctly, the higher the chance and one in three will win a chapter from my book. It's going to be delivered electronically to you, a real chapter from my The Ultimate diabetes book. So go ahead, finish the video, take the quiz and win. Okay guys, so this is not an advertisement, okay? It's new. It is creating a lot of noise and I'm going to talk about it because I feel like I have to open a doctor. Come on, all right? Because if you don't hear from me, you're going to hear from someone. You better hear from me so that you can get the right information. So what is this for? It's for weight loss. Why there's a lot of noise? Because their studies are pretty damn good for when it comes to weight loss. I know, I know, you're going to be like a dog, you know, just do keto and you know, just don't eat food, you'll be okay. Well, if that was the case, there will be no obesity, right? So preaching is to a point works and after some point you're like, you know what, you gotta do something. Okay, so if medication is needed, sometimes it is needed. Not the first choice, not the last choice, but you need to know your options, right? So it is a molecule called somagulotide. So somagulotide is the same molecule in ozempic. Now you've probably heard of ozempic either on TV or you're already on it or somebody's on it. So it's a well-known medication for diabetes and it has been the strongest pretty much medication in terms of helping diabetes. And the way somagulotide works is that it is an intestinal hormone. So they basically mimic that intestinal hormone that is broken down by the body very quickly. So you eat and that intestinal hormones really get released and that makes the insulin in the body and then disappears because you know, it is designed to take care of that food ingestion. Now in overweight individuals and in diabetics, that mechanism is broken. So in a way that they're either not responsive to their hormone anymore or they're just not making enough of it. So as a result, you know, scientists come and say, okay, how are we gonna, you know, defeat that? Well, we can make a molecule and we can prevent that molecule that is very similar or almost the same molecule as the intestinal hormone that our body makes. But instead of letting that broken down, it sticks around. Okay. So as a result, you know, the action of that hormone continues. Now one of the most important action of that hormone is that it keeps you the sense of satiety. So it makes you feel full. There are receptors in your gastrointestinal system all over your body, brain, the GLP-1 receptors are pretty much everywhere. And in the satiety center as well. So there is direct relationship, you can tell, between the food we are ingesting and the rest of our body. And the hormones released as a result of the food we are eating. When you take the molecule like this, like a somagulotide, you basically feel like you are constantly in a fed state. So you feel like you're, you don't need to eat. Isn't that great? I mean, it's great. Well, we're gonna talk about side effects, right? So you're gonna be like, it cannot be that great, right? There are, of course, downsides to it. And we'll come to that. Now, the reason that they changed the name, not trying, they're not trying to do a marketing trick or anything like that. What they, the reason they changed the name is because it is a different molecule and it's studied differently. It is not studied in diabetic population. It is studied in normal population. Actually, in one of the difficult populations that we deal with every day is like the 45, 50 year old middle age women trying to transition to menopause and their metabolism just, boom, hits the wall. And they are like so desperate. I feel so bad for them every day in my clinic. I'm like, I don't know what to tell you. It's just, that's the way it is, you know, like, I can't, I can't just tell you just stop eating in the rest of your life. Now, the thing is with this, they increase the dose. But what happens in a lot of medications? You start a medication and people get used to it, right? And then if the maximum dose indicated in the label, you cannot go any higher than that and you don't know if it is safe or not to go higher than that, then you don't go high, you know, higher dose. So, so with these, what they did, they did safety studies on thousands and thousands of people to make sure that even over a year, the weight loss happened, the weight loss was maintained and people tolerated in a safe manner. So 80 to 90% of people, I think 85% of people were able to complete this huge, humongous, very long study. And they had, of course, double blind, you know, some people had placebo, some people did not have placebo, some people didn't have the real, real thing. And they wanted to see how much these people are losing weight. And they even at some point stopped people from using this and they switched them over and to see what happens, right? So with WeGoV, people lost a lot of weight. So around 15% of their body weight. So 15% is a huge number to me and not just losing it and maintaining it. Now you're going to be like, Doug, you know, how do you maintain? Do you have to stay on this medication forever? Well, in a way, unless you, in time, you decided that you don't want that the bad habits that you used to have that you used to crave those ice cream, you used to crave those candies, and you don't crave it anymore because you're on this drug. And we're going to do an unboxing in a second. I'm just just not holding this. I'm going to show you the real thing. But the bottom line is you will need to either stop those habits, the bad habits that you used to have, or stick to the drug. You know, I never say anybody that you have to stay on this forever, but you can stop it. And if you can go without it and you can maintain the weight loss, be my guest, then nobody's forcing you to stay on any medication at all, right? So if you use medications as a supplementary, right? So same thing with herbal preparations, same thing with anything you use extra to help your appetite, your diabetes, whatever. So let's open this up. Let's see what is in there. So I sneaked this out. Well, not me, the wrap. So nobody has samples yet. I didn't have a sample in my office yet. But I told the drug rabbit, I said, look, you know, my viewers are going to be like wondering about this. They're going to eventually hear it on TV and all that. And they're going to be like, doc, what about this? Here's the deal. That is the box. It comes in a four pin. Now, what is the difference, the difference from Ozenpic that it is not a multi use pen? They made this super easy. And I'm going to actually try to show you over here. Maybe I can put it right there. Now, what they did is, this is a single use pen, 0.25 milligram is the starting dose. And it goes all the way up to 2.4 and you increase the dose once a month. And the reason for that is the side effects, which we'll talk about in a second. So you basically, I don't even know how to use a span by the way, you know, just to be honest, up, there you go. You just removed the cap, you know, common sense. And then I think, oh, there's the needle there. Don't look. Don't look, but they they hit it pretty well. But if you really look and don't get too close to your eye, but it's there. Anyways, I think it's smaller than Toulouse de Nile. Anyways, this Toulouse de Nile is humongous. Alright, so I'm going to push this just like that. This is your skin. This is your belly. And then you go, you don't actually push here. You basically push the whole thing against yourself, against your body. Bam. And then you hold it, and it delivers the, you can see the liquid is going in. And I think, oh yeah, I can see it's all wet here. Alright, so and you can see it's yellow after it's complete. You can see that it's all delivered. And you're pretty much done. And now what happens? Now you got the injection. Now you're like, what did I do? What's gonna happen? Am I gonna die? No, I don't think so. I think you will be just fine. Now what's gonna happen is you will have probably some nausea, especially within the first 48 hours. Okay, now some people, they're gonna be like, nothing happened to me. Yeah, again, everybody is different, right? So you can be big, you can be small, you can be a high metabolizer, low metabolizer. Some people may have severe side effects that is pretty much a minority. I would say, you know, people who are like vomiting and stuff is probably in my experience with semi-gulatide, which is the Ozympic, the other drug, with that dose in my experience is like maybe 3% or so. You know, I don't even remember the last time somebody vomited on these. Very elderly individuals are more susceptible. You know, people are on multiple drugs, listen, some people are on like 20, 30 drugs, and that's like a 31st drug, you know, that may be a problem, right? But overall, it's pretty well tolerated. And the good thing is the nausea tends to go away. Now what are other side effects? Well, it's a gastrointestinal hormone, right? It's like a new guy in the block, you know, you already have some gastrointestinal hormone. And this guy is coming to your body and saying what to do. So that's not welcomed always by your body. And you end up getting some maybe diarrhea, abdominal pain can happen. But people tolerate this pretty well. And the reason is they lose damn weight. So when people lose weight, they can take anything. So but the thing is they also, you know, that tends to go away. Let's say you have a little bit of abdominal pain, you go for the second shot, third shot by the fourth shot. Most of the time, the side effects go away unless they are super severe. If you have this really severe side effects, I wouldn't increase the dose, I would stick to the same dose, and maybe stay on the lower dose until the side effects go away. But definitely they tend to go away. Now what are other side effects? Now, occasionally people report headaches, people sometimes report fatigue, and people report all sorts of things, but not common stuff. You know, people, they may say, oh, I hallucinated. I highly doubt that it is from this medication, because it's not really reported. But I don't tell people that you're lying or anything. I'm okay. Well, if you think that causes hallucination, then it causes hallucination. What can I say? But the but in real studies with the placebo controlled studies, you know, I can tell you that the nausea, abdominal pain, diarrhea sometimes, or constipation, headaches, fatigue are most common. Now, who should not be using this drug at all? Well, there's something called medullary thyroid cancer, and the pancreatic cancer. Now, pancreatic cancer is kind of uncommon, and medullary thyroid cancer is even more uncommon. Now, don't confuse the medullary thyroid cancer with the regular thyroid cancer because the regular thyroid cancer is everywhere. So medullary thyroid cancer is a unique type of cancer we've very rarely seen. It's like a one in a million kind of situation. But if you have a family history of it, you know, maybe you should stay away from this because the animal studies show that the red studies that the cancer medullary thyroid cancer risk may go high, or pancreatic cancer risk can go high. So if you have pancreatic cancer in your family or medullary thyroid cancer, definitely stay away from that. But if you don't have any history, your risk increase is going to be this small, I would say. Now, the other thing is pancreatitis. So if you had pancreatitis in the past, especially if you don't know the origin why you had pancreatitis, there are a few more cases out of a few thousand patients with pancreatitis, pancreatic inflammation, which is presenting with severe abdominal pain, and it can radiate to the back, it can end up adwomiting and abdominal pain together. So if you have those symptoms, go to ER. But as I said, you know, this is something again, very rare. I don't even remember again, last time I had a pancreatitis with ozempic. But I hear that sometimes, you know, people start on, you know, semi-glutide or other GLP1 agents and end up with pancreatitis, rarely, that that's not unheard of. Retinopathy is another one that's reported. So if you have an active eye disease, like let's say you have bleeding in your eye because of diabetes, the retina blood vessels have some GLP1 receptors, and blood sugar changes also can induce that there is a slight increase in progressive retinopathy. Not that if you if you have mild retinopathy or no retinopathy, like eye disease, diabetic eye disease, it wouldn't cause problems according to studies. But if you have progressive retinopathy, bleeding already in your eye and stuff like that, then it may make it a little bit worse, potentially, not for sure, but potentially can make it a little bit worse. So these are the side effects guys, but definitely the weight loss is so far the best in the market. And if you want to try what you have to do is you need to talk to your doctor if you have a private insurance, not a Medicare or Medicaid in the United States I'm talking about, you can talk to your doctor to order that for you. It goes to a special pharmacy. It is I don't know the deal because the way the company operates is they told us that it has to go to a special pharmacy because sometimes using those coupons are like pulling teeth and the pharmacies are sometimes confused what to do. So they try to centralize that. So only a few pharmacies in your neighborhood may be doing that. So your physician will probably know where to send it. But in any ways, guys, this is by no means to promote this drug. The best weight loss is to work with your diet and exercise. If you have a diabetes coach, these are the best ways. If you have a weight loss coach, do it yourself is the best option. But if your efforts of do it yourself have failed, you tried also diets and you're not going anywhere. Sometimes you got to pull the trigger and do something about it because it's your health. Instead of just staying overweight and unhealthy, you have to do something about it. So guys, make sure you do the quiz below to show to prove that you have learned something and to win my chapter from my diabetes book and maybe potentially the entire book if you win enough times. See you next time. Give a thumbs up, like and share. All right. Thank you for watching and I want you to be more informed and more educated. So to do that, go ahead and watch this next video right here.