It's too expensive, but when prices come down even a little I would expect the savings in improved health to lead to an overall lowering of medical costs. As always, US system sucks balls.
My wife is on Wegovy. That injector pictured above is a special kind of perverse design. There’s a plastic donut-shaped trigger the needle has to pass through. Once the trigger starts the flow of medicine, it cannot be stopped. No way to, for example, pay for a higher dosage and use a little at a time, if you were prescribed the 0.25 mg starter dose but only 1 and 1.7 are in stock anywhere. (Without, say, milking the pen like a poisonous snake and using a needle and syringe.)
That would mean reusing a needle, which is not sanitary or safe. Now if they did a design like those multi colored ink pens from middle school, that would be different.
I’m not sure I follow. Why would a needle be reused? That’s never ok to do.
The pictured injector is single use. The weird workaround would never be ok’d by any doctor, and even if it was, a clean needle would be used to withdraw and administer medicine from the hypothetical medicine ampule for each dose. I’m not qualified to measure loose liquid medicine, and she’s on the second highest dose anyway.
A better design would be more like the pen used by the original senaglutide medication this is related to, ozempic. Screw on a disposable pen needle, dial your dosage on the twisty knob on the other end, inject, dispose of needle. But instead they deliberately designed this thing, with a latching device that starts squirting medicine with no way to stop it. If the user is not familiar with needles and jerks away, the needle comes back out but medicine is still squirting.
It’s a good medicine, except supply issues are making it difficult. My wife’s refill at the hospital pharmacy has been pending since end of February. It’s a weekly injection but her last dose was 15 days ago as of this morning.
In your initial comment I thought you wanted to keep the design and only add an adjuster. I was merely pointing out that you'd need a new needle each time. My guess is that these things are designed for the lowest common denominator. Trusting that people are actually going to replace the needle between dosages is probably a bad idea.
Oh, that makes sense. I’m diabetic and she’s not and there’s definitely a difference in familiarity with injectable medications between us. Maybe I’m seeing dark patterns where they don’t actually exist.
Fascinating. What a shame that my insurance will not.
A lot of insurances wait until Medicare decides and follow suit so it may be coming.
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