Our Patients' Experience With Semaglutide

Foreign. I'm Dr. Moak. I'm going to talk to you about semaglutide and what we've done here at Allure with our employees and what we're seeing with our patients. So semaglutide is a medication. It's an injectable or once a week medication form that we're using. It was originally designed for diabetes, type 2 diabetes. And they found that it worked very good on not just diabetes, but lowering people's body weight and also improving their cardiovascular variables. And it was so effective for weight loss that they did additional study, a few additional studies, and then it got FDA approved for weight loss, even people without diabetes. Now, the intention of the drug, which is quite expensive, was to take it for the rest of your life like you would a hypertension or diabetic medication. But with so many things, we can actually make it go away. So if you're overweight and you lose the weight and you're no longer overweight, you're essentially cured. You don't have it anymore and you wouldn't need to take the drug, but people maybe would bounce back. So in the clinical studies for the drug company, they put people on placebo or the semaglutide injectable weekly for a body over a year. And people lost about 15% of their body weight. And when they took them off the medication, people that were not on placebo or on the semaglutide gained some weight back, but not all of it. They kept their weight down. However, however, they told them, the patients that were in the study group, to go back to their prior lifestyle of eating more calories and stop exercise. So what would happen if we told people to stay on the diet or stay in an altered lifestyle and continue to be active? Well, you should expect that weight can stay down, but there's still this metabolic tendency to want to gain weight. Metformin is another common diabetic medication. It's the most common medicine in the world. It's extremely safe. In fact, just so safe is being studied to see if it makes people live longer. I take it for anti aging reasons. And if we put people on semaglutide and get their weight down, we can switch more to metformin and it appears to keep the weight off. So here's a non clinical trial we did in our office in our South Carolina location. We had individuals that were overweight or obese or extremely obese, and we put them on semaglutide instead of, instead of a year, just for a few months and then switch them over to metformin. So this is a four month weight loss project using both semaglutide, the injectable, every week, and then switching over to metformin to keep the weight off. So in this group of patients, the average weight loss was 24 pounds in four months. There is no weight gain after removal of semaglutide and there was an average of 12 and a half percent body weight lost. So in the clinical study, it took actually about a year to get to that percentage of body weight loss. We did it much quicker. And what was different? Well, a couple factors. First off, they were a little bit more motivated than people in a clinical study. There were employees and people that worked with us kind of similar to people that come to us as patients. And we asked them to go on a Mediterranean diet, which is a diet that includes extra virgin olive oil, whole foods, elimination of processed food, elimination of red meats, and this is a very effective weight loss diet. Switching over to metformin after the cessation of the semaglutide, coupled with the fact that in this case, we bought our staff's lunch, we pay for meals for our lower offices, we always have, or have for years. And we just made sure that they were cooking us foods that were both palatable, they tasted good, but that were in the confines of being Mediterranean based. And this is what we're recommending our patients that they're going to do. The semaglutide, there's an opportunity right now where it's very inexpensive. We can get a compounded version. This is, that will only last until the manufacturer with the much more expensive version catches up. So we give you a three month supply. We expect 10% or more, your body weight to drop off and then switch over to Metformin for two or three months and let that tolerance to the medication go away. And if somebody has additional weight to lose, you can start at that lower dose of semaglutide. Again, the way it works with semaglutide is an escalating dose. You start with a tiny dose and then it goes up to the maximum dose. So for maximum weight loss, we're to cycle semaglutide and metformin, mix that with a Mediterranean diet, which is the diet we should be on for weight loss and weight maintenance and of course, increasing activity. So, thank you very much.