Hamburg journalist Stephan Bartels has been struggling with his weight for 30 years and has been diabetic for eleven years. In October he began injecting himself with the drug semaglutide. Here he talks about how difficult it was to get the drug at the pharmacy, about side effects and his changed eating habits.
One usually expects miracles from a miracle cure, and I am no exception. When I took my first injection of Ozempic into my stomach on October 4th, I expected, in this order and immediately: nausea, bloated stomach, dizziness, headache. Not only are these the most common known side effects of the active ingredient called semaglutide, they are also exactly what my two informants told me about their Ozempic experiences: my little brother and my mother. Because yes, their diabetes got the stuff under control. But it wasn’t nice, as one and the other said.