GLP-1 companies pay US doctors big bucks — as much as $1 million — to promote weight-loss drugs. That has critics weighing in

But as the Washington Post has reported, GLP-1 manufacturers are signing deals with influencers who wield possibly even greater direct-to-consumer power than Williams: doctors.

According to the Post’s research, since 2018, major drug companies including Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk have paid more than 270,000 doctors to promote GLP-1 drugs — on medical boards, in their research, at educational seminars and directly to fellow physicians. Dr. Carlos Campos is one of them.

To date, the family physician has received $1 million from drug companies to promote GLP-1s. Campos has a practice near San Antonio in New Braunfels, Texas, but travels all over the U.S. for his GLP-1 promotional work.

“I’m a lot like an evangelical preacher man,” he told the Post. “They hire me to sell the science.”

Campos is a true convert, convinced of the GLP-1s’ effectiveness based on his patients’ experience. And his promotional work — as well as that of his well-paid peers — is legal.

Novo Nordisk shared a statement with Moneywise that the company follows “the highest ethical standards as well as all legal and regulatory requirements” in sharing scientific information with healthcare professionals, following the industry’s own Code on Interactions With Health Care Professionals.

But critics like Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, who teaches pharmacology and physiology at Georgetown University Medical Center, are concerned about the side effects of mixing money and medical advice.

“There’s a lot of naivete not just in the U.S. but everywhere about drug companies educating anyone about drugs,” she told Moneywise. “It should be done by people who don’t have a financial interest.

The weight of money in weight-loss drug promotion

The paid promotion is definitely having an impact. A recent Gallup poll found that 90% of Americans are aware of GLP-1s today — including Eli Lilly’s name-brand drugs Mounjaro and Zepbound and Novo Nordisk’s products Ozempic, Wegovy and Saxendra.

The same Gallup poll found that 11% of U.S. adults have prescriptions for GLP-1s for weight loss, up from 3% two years ago, when Medicaid was already spending $8.6 billion on the drugs, according to Forbes. By 2030, an estimated 30 million Americans will be on GLP-1s and the global market could be worth $200 billion.

One place doctors learn about GLP-1s is at industry-sponsored medical seminars. Each year, U.S. physicians must take Continuing Medical Education (CME) courses to maintain their medical licenses. Different states have different rules about how many courses and what topics they need to stay up-to-date.

This continuing education can be a costly endeavor for physicians. But thanks to drug companies like Eli Lilly and Co and Novo Nordisk, there are free, industry-sponsored CME options. As Fugh-Berman observes, such courses are an enticement to physicians who want to save money on education.

What’s more, some of the physician-educators who lead the courses receive pay from the drug companies to promote their weight-loss products to physicians during the talks.

Fugh-Berman notes that objective and skeptical as an audience of healthcare providers may aim to be, they are still being influenced by drug company marketing messages — at medical meetings, in research and one on one. Research points to this bias.

“It starts to pervade the whole profession,” she said. “Everywhere you turn, you’re getting the same messages.”

Fugh-Berman is concerned about what is missing in that messaging — including the unknown long-term effects of GLP-1s. Research indicates that when people go off GLP-1s, they regain weight. Weight cycling (going up and down in weight) has serious health consequences.

She adds that while diet and exercise may be mentioned in the promotional materials, they are underemphasized, as per a study that found that “limited clinician and public knowledge on nutritional and lifestyle interventions can limit GLP-1 efficacy, equitable results, and cost-effectiveness.”

Separating GLP-1 hype from health education

Fugh-Berman noted that there is a division of the FDA’s Office of Prescription Drug Promotion (OPDP) that regulates prescription drug promotion to make sure it’s “truthful, balanced, and accurately communicated.”