I am getting sick of these stories where someone irresponsible blames something convenient for normal people as being the cause of their issues.
A small minority of people abused codeine, so now women like me have to suffer from dysmenorrhoea every month because docs won’t write a prescription.
A small minority of people using alcohol delivery inappropriately so now they want to restrict the ability for same day delivery in the ACT.
I know many women who used these services to get access to GLP-1s when their GPs refused to prescribe them because “You just need to eat less” and dismissed their concerns regarding food noise etc.
Why do people need the government to constantly protect them from their own stupidity? It’s absurd.
AussieKoala-2795 on
Having Black Friday sales for prescription medication is extremely disturbing.
Elvecinogallo on
An adult is refused medication by their gp, so they go around their gp to another service, but it’s somehow the fault of the service? 🤔
InanimateObject4 on
Insert cyclist stick meme here.
phido3000 on
So are they going to put her in mental care? Seems like self harm with lots of steps.
geekchick__ on
She also complains that after she quit using the Juniper service, after a few months she started getting ads again. Now that is not OK at all if she unsubscribed, but then there is a paragraph which specifically says she saw ads on her social media timeline. That is not the same thing as the company trying to get previous customers back.
123chuckaway on
“I did my own research”
Barrel-Of-Tigers on
I think there’s a middle ground but I’m not remotely surprised Juniper is coming under fire.
As someone who previously used Juniper, I immediately recognised that the lack of safe guards would be easily manipulated by someone who shouldn’t be able to access the medication. There should be a level of personal responsibility – but this lady shouldn’t have met the criteria for telehealth access to this medication.
1) I did meet the criteria to access the medication, but there were no checks in place which actually guaranteed this if I’d been lying. They asked my weight and height, and I had a phone call consult. I want to say they asked for a photo, but I think it was just of my face holding up my ID. I never had a video call, submitted physcial measurements, or sent photos. The ongoing support was largely text based and just asked for me to input my weight (manually or using bluetooth scales they sent).
2) They immediately prescribed me for 12 months upfront and on an automatic increase to the 3rd highest dose at 4 weeks per dose. This as I’ve come to learn really isn’t necessary, and best practice even if you end up prescribing multiple repeats should be done after you’ve found a more stable dosing schedule. Lots of people also never need to go to the higher doses, and unnecessarily over medicating them can a) prematurely push them onto a higher dose with more side effects and b) mean if they do become more resistant over time they’ve lost the ability to titrate up as needed to overcome this.
3) I appreciated not physcially needing to see my GP every month and getting things auto delivered, but I can see how limited oversight on the physical progress and changes a patient is having on these medications could be an issue. I had one stage where I asked about dosage changes and needed a second consult with a GP – again over the phone and it wasn’t the same GP as prior. The rest of the interim medical check ins I had were via email by random RNs or occasionally NPs.
4) After I moved to a different provider I also got a *lot* of emails trying to get me to resubscribe. I found this really odd for a medication provider, and don’t think it’s particuarly ethical to offer sales to entice people to as far as they knew restart a medication. Unsubscribing is an option sure, but I think there’s a range of reasons these emails shouldn’t have been sent in the first place. This is medication not a streaming subscription.
planetarybum on
While I think having ‘telehealth’ solely to sell weight loss drugs is totally shit, the article reads wrong.
With careful supervision from a GP, with frequent follow-up, they can be beneficial for people who binge eat. Having mental health conditions doesn’t automatically disqualify someone.
I dont know if Juniper does this type of follow-up but I’m disappointed with ABC running these Current Affair type articles with click bait titles and minimal research.
robot428 on
Everyone is blaming her and she does have partial responsibility, but also Junipers advertising practices are predatory, and they skirt the absolute limits of what they can say about prescription medication risks and benefits without breaking the law.
Also I can’t think of another prescription only medication that is advertised in Australia like this one is. Imagine if they were putting out ads for antidepressants or opioids or anything else, it would be weird, why is this so normalised.
giraffe_mountains on
**“Ms Munch completed Juniper’s online questionnaire and disclosed her history of an eating disorder and mental health conditions, including severe depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.”**
Automatic fail in duty of care by them prescribing it to her.
She can doctor shop all she want, but the protections should be in place to stop someone from doctor shopping. End of the day it shouldn’t prescribed to someone that declares a history of disordered eating over telehealth.
Artemis1971 on
Honestly, I’m just feeling completely jaded by the world atm. We’re all fucked. One, or all of these things are going to be the death of humanity. The 1%, climate change, obesity, Trump, medical inequality, consumerism.
SaltpeterSal on
I think the messiness of this is causing people to condemn the lady as shopping around for drugs, to the point that these comments are talking like she was a bikie doctor-shopping for pseudo. That’s not how eating disorders work, you’re dealing with someone who has a mental illness approaching medical experts for an opinion that makes sense to them.
In the meantime, if the expert notices she’s been asking around about this already, they have a duty of care to treat the thing that’s causing her to ask around.
Juniper used an app to prescribe someone they’ve never met a drug that is fantastic for treating binge eating disorders, but can relapse anorexia and bulimia, after she told them about a record of ED. They’ve been prescribing Ozempic since the days when diabetics couldn’t get it because Sharon wanted to look good on the jet ski.
>After finally entering recovery, she contacted Juniper to raise concerns about its prescribing processes.
>She said she received a call within a week from the company’s Clinical Director Dr Matt Vickers, who apologised and told her he would conduct a root cause analysis into her case.
>”They offered me the money back that I spent on the medication and that was back in my bank within a day,” she said.
>However, several months later, she began to receive discount codes and promotional emails encouraging her to sign up again.
You have to admit, it’s a predatory way to handle someone with a mental illness and is very much in the Juniper business model. Just Google them.
PrettyLittleLiar1234 on
Ugh, she’s going to ruin it just like parents ruined melatonin.
jasmynerice on
I use Juniper and I got more support than I would with a GP. You can talk to nurses or your doctor and get nausea medication when required. I recently went to a GP to get the same script due to it being $100 more expensive with juniper and he asked me NOTHING about my medical history. It is my local surgery so they do have my medical history but not everything.
If you are told by a professional not to go on meds and you go ahead and do it anyway that’s on you.
I get these companies can be predatory but seriously
Real_RobinGoodfellow on
I am a bit confided about what she was actually hospitalised with, as from the pictures she certainly wasn’t underweight even during the hospital admission
Scrambledsilence on
Talk about nominative determinism.
nameless_other on
Online chemists are one thing, but all online prescription services are suspect.
I had a client who has schizophrenia and is on heavy anti-psychotic medication get greenlit for a medical marijuana prescription from an online service. The medication they’re on basically puts them on a national do-not-prescribe-weed database, that I guess the online service just didn’t check?
But I actually don’t think these companies care that they’re acting sloppily or unethically, because they believe the platform they’re doing it on will shelter them from proper regulation or consequences.
twillytea on
Honestly, this is 100% her fault, although I agree that services like Juniper are predatory and need to be more heavily regulated
stitchescomeundone on
Anytime medical weight loss is advertised to you in any way in Australia please report them to the TGA
justfxckit on
Begging people to actually read the article, because she is not asking for Juniper to be banned or removing blame from herself entirely. This isn’t the same as not being able to order melatonin anymore.
>She said the medication did not directly cause her hospitalisation, but triggered her, which led to a cascade of related health issues.
She disclosed her mental health history to Juniper in her initial questionnaire. SHE DID THE RIGHT THING even though she was signing up out of “desperation” to lose weight. Her responses should have flagged with them and she should not have been prescribed the weightloss meds with so little oversight.
>After finally entering recovery, she contacted Juniper to raise concerns about its prescribing processes … She said she received a call within a week from the company’s Clinical Director Dr Matt Vickers, who apologised and told her he would conduct a root cause analysis into her case … However, several months later, she began to receive discount codes and promotional emails encouraging her to sign up again.
This part is cooked. It’s like Sportsbet sending a “we miss you” email to someone who excluded themselves from using betting websites.
TGin-the-goldy on
At some point, people need to take responsibility for their own actions
tktsmnypssprt on
The article mentions a couple of times that she disclosed she had an eating disorder. But it doesn’t say which eating disorder it was, which I feel could be relevant to the article and there are several types of eating disorder.
Obviously someone with anorexia should not be prescribed weight loss drugs such as the drugs prescribed by this company. But what if it was a binge eating disorder, and she told the company she wanted to minimise the volume of food she was eating?
discojeans on
This company will not stop giving me ads either, I’m also someone who has a history of ED, I’m not sure how to stop them. I click “not interested” but I keep getting them regardless
Piratartz on
She kinda sounds like a doctor shopper or cannot take no as an answer. Yes, the online platform making it easier to access the drug is part of the problem, but the motivated patient is one helluva force driving the demand.
Salamok on
The dangers of the “keep asking the question until you get the answer you want” approach.
aheretic on
The number of patients I’ve taken care of with a history of schizophrenia or drug-induced psychosis who have been prescribed high strength cannabis, or who are underweight with anorexia who have been prescribed ozempic… The endless YouTube ads recommending I sign up and work with a “partner practitioner” (whatever that means). These online prescription factories are evil – fee for service, and the service is the drug the patient wants, whether it is appropriate/indicated/safe or not.
FishermanWaste1268 on
Man fuck these guys. If u really want to use glp drugs check out the sub for r/Retatrutide
A years supply of reta (10x30mg vials) costs like 200 usd plus shipping.
Glittering_Virus679 on
There have been a couple of ABC articles on this topic in recent weeks and they leave a very poor taste in my mouth. In both cases the subjects were women. In my experience it is far, far, far more common for women to be denied treatment options they demonstrably need and are eligible for, than for women to be over-prescribed for pain or perimenopause or other well documented women’s health issues. Women are still expected to suffer through things, without any attempt to investigate further, and are generally disbelieved about the severity of pain. Medical groups don’t believe that because they are just not that good at checking they are actually providing good care from the perspective of patient experience. Good luck finding a truly supportive ‘long term GP’. Good luck affording a fantastic care team. Shutting down telehealth providers on the basis women can’t be believed about their own experiences just feels like yet more medical misogyny. The ABC coverage is giving me the ick as it is fundamentally infected with the same problematic attitudes about there not being larger issues in medical care.
29 Comments
I am getting sick of these stories where someone irresponsible blames something convenient for normal people as being the cause of their issues.
A small minority of people abused codeine, so now women like me have to suffer from dysmenorrhoea every month because docs won’t write a prescription.
A small minority of people using alcohol delivery inappropriately so now they want to restrict the ability for same day delivery in the ACT.
I know many women who used these services to get access to GLP-1s when their GPs refused to prescribe them because “You just need to eat less” and dismissed their concerns regarding food noise etc.
Why do people need the government to constantly protect them from their own stupidity? It’s absurd.
Having Black Friday sales for prescription medication is extremely disturbing.
An adult is refused medication by their gp, so they go around their gp to another service, but it’s somehow the fault of the service? 🤔
Insert cyclist stick meme here.
So are they going to put her in mental care? Seems like self harm with lots of steps.
She also complains that after she quit using the Juniper service, after a few months she started getting ads again. Now that is not OK at all if she unsubscribed, but then there is a paragraph which specifically says she saw ads on her social media timeline. That is not the same thing as the company trying to get previous customers back.
“I did my own research”
I think there’s a middle ground but I’m not remotely surprised Juniper is coming under fire.
As someone who previously used Juniper, I immediately recognised that the lack of safe guards would be easily manipulated by someone who shouldn’t be able to access the medication. There should be a level of personal responsibility – but this lady shouldn’t have met the criteria for telehealth access to this medication.
1) I did meet the criteria to access the medication, but there were no checks in place which actually guaranteed this if I’d been lying. They asked my weight and height, and I had a phone call consult. I want to say they asked for a photo, but I think it was just of my face holding up my ID. I never had a video call, submitted physcial measurements, or sent photos. The ongoing support was largely text based and just asked for me to input my weight (manually or using bluetooth scales they sent).
2) They immediately prescribed me for 12 months upfront and on an automatic increase to the 3rd highest dose at 4 weeks per dose. This as I’ve come to learn really isn’t necessary, and best practice even if you end up prescribing multiple repeats should be done after you’ve found a more stable dosing schedule. Lots of people also never need to go to the higher doses, and unnecessarily over medicating them can a) prematurely push them onto a higher dose with more side effects and b) mean if they do become more resistant over time they’ve lost the ability to titrate up as needed to overcome this.
3) I appreciated not physcially needing to see my GP every month and getting things auto delivered, but I can see how limited oversight on the physical progress and changes a patient is having on these medications could be an issue. I had one stage where I asked about dosage changes and needed a second consult with a GP – again over the phone and it wasn’t the same GP as prior. The rest of the interim medical check ins I had were via email by random RNs or occasionally NPs.
4) After I moved to a different provider I also got a *lot* of emails trying to get me to resubscribe. I found this really odd for a medication provider, and don’t think it’s particuarly ethical to offer sales to entice people to as far as they knew restart a medication. Unsubscribing is an option sure, but I think there’s a range of reasons these emails shouldn’t have been sent in the first place. This is medication not a streaming subscription.
While I think having ‘telehealth’ solely to sell weight loss drugs is totally shit, the article reads wrong.
With careful supervision from a GP, with frequent follow-up, they can be beneficial for people who binge eat. Having mental health conditions doesn’t automatically disqualify someone.
I dont know if Juniper does this type of follow-up but I’m disappointed with ABC running these Current Affair type articles with click bait titles and minimal research.
Everyone is blaming her and she does have partial responsibility, but also Junipers advertising practices are predatory, and they skirt the absolute limits of what they can say about prescription medication risks and benefits without breaking the law.
Also I can’t think of another prescription only medication that is advertised in Australia like this one is. Imagine if they were putting out ads for antidepressants or opioids or anything else, it would be weird, why is this so normalised.
**“Ms Munch completed Juniper’s online questionnaire and disclosed her history of an eating disorder and mental health conditions, including severe depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.”**
Automatic fail in duty of care by them prescribing it to her.
She can doctor shop all she want, but the protections should be in place to stop someone from doctor shopping. End of the day it shouldn’t prescribed to someone that declares a history of disordered eating over telehealth.
Honestly, I’m just feeling completely jaded by the world atm. We’re all fucked. One, or all of these things are going to be the death of humanity. The 1%, climate change, obesity, Trump, medical inequality, consumerism.
I think the messiness of this is causing people to condemn the lady as shopping around for drugs, to the point that these comments are talking like she was a bikie doctor-shopping for pseudo. That’s not how eating disorders work, you’re dealing with someone who has a mental illness approaching medical experts for an opinion that makes sense to them.
In the meantime, if the expert notices she’s been asking around about this already, they have a duty of care to treat the thing that’s causing her to ask around.
Juniper used an app to prescribe someone they’ve never met a drug that is fantastic for treating binge eating disorders, but can relapse anorexia and bulimia, after she told them about a record of ED. They’ve been prescribing Ozempic since the days when diabetics couldn’t get it because Sharon wanted to look good on the jet ski.
>After finally entering recovery, she contacted Juniper to raise concerns about its prescribing processes.
>She said she received a call within a week from the company’s Clinical Director Dr Matt Vickers, who apologised and told her he would conduct a root cause analysis into her case.
>”They offered me the money back that I spent on the medication and that was back in my bank within a day,” she said.
>However, several months later, she began to receive discount codes and promotional emails encouraging her to sign up again.
You have to admit, it’s a predatory way to handle someone with a mental illness and is very much in the Juniper business model. Just Google them.
Ugh, she’s going to ruin it just like parents ruined melatonin.
I use Juniper and I got more support than I would with a GP. You can talk to nurses or your doctor and get nausea medication when required. I recently went to a GP to get the same script due to it being $100 more expensive with juniper and he asked me NOTHING about my medical history. It is my local surgery so they do have my medical history but not everything.
If you are told by a professional not to go on meds and you go ahead and do it anyway that’s on you.
I get these companies can be predatory but seriously
I am a bit confided about what she was actually hospitalised with, as from the pictures she certainly wasn’t underweight even during the hospital admission
Talk about nominative determinism.
Online chemists are one thing, but all online prescription services are suspect.
I had a client who has schizophrenia and is on heavy anti-psychotic medication get greenlit for a medical marijuana prescription from an online service. The medication they’re on basically puts them on a national do-not-prescribe-weed database, that I guess the online service just didn’t check?
But I actually don’t think these companies care that they’re acting sloppily or unethically, because they believe the platform they’re doing it on will shelter them from proper regulation or consequences.
Honestly, this is 100% her fault, although I agree that services like Juniper are predatory and need to be more heavily regulated
Anytime medical weight loss is advertised to you in any way in Australia please report them to the TGA
Begging people to actually read the article, because she is not asking for Juniper to be banned or removing blame from herself entirely. This isn’t the same as not being able to order melatonin anymore.
>She said the medication did not directly cause her hospitalisation, but triggered her, which led to a cascade of related health issues.
She disclosed her mental health history to Juniper in her initial questionnaire. SHE DID THE RIGHT THING even though she was signing up out of “desperation” to lose weight. Her responses should have flagged with them and she should not have been prescribed the weightloss meds with so little oversight.
>After finally entering recovery, she contacted Juniper to raise concerns about its prescribing processes … She said she received a call within a week from the company’s Clinical Director Dr Matt Vickers, who apologised and told her he would conduct a root cause analysis into her case … However, several months later, she began to receive discount codes and promotional emails encouraging her to sign up again.
This part is cooked. It’s like Sportsbet sending a “we miss you” email to someone who excluded themselves from using betting websites.
At some point, people need to take responsibility for their own actions
The article mentions a couple of times that she disclosed she had an eating disorder. But it doesn’t say which eating disorder it was, which I feel could be relevant to the article and there are several types of eating disorder.
Obviously someone with anorexia should not be prescribed weight loss drugs such as the drugs prescribed by this company. But what if it was a binge eating disorder, and she told the company she wanted to minimise the volume of food she was eating?
This company will not stop giving me ads either, I’m also someone who has a history of ED, I’m not sure how to stop them. I click “not interested” but I keep getting them regardless
She kinda sounds like a doctor shopper or cannot take no as an answer. Yes, the online platform making it easier to access the drug is part of the problem, but the motivated patient is one helluva force driving the demand.
The dangers of the “keep asking the question until you get the answer you want” approach.
The number of patients I’ve taken care of with a history of schizophrenia or drug-induced psychosis who have been prescribed high strength cannabis, or who are underweight with anorexia who have been prescribed ozempic… The endless YouTube ads recommending I sign up and work with a “partner practitioner” (whatever that means). These online prescription factories are evil – fee for service, and the service is the drug the patient wants, whether it is appropriate/indicated/safe or not.
Man fuck these guys. If u really want to use glp drugs check out the sub for r/Retatrutide
A years supply of reta (10x30mg vials) costs like 200 usd plus shipping.
There have been a couple of ABC articles on this topic in recent weeks and they leave a very poor taste in my mouth. In both cases the subjects were women. In my experience it is far, far, far more common for women to be denied treatment options they demonstrably need and are eligible for, than for women to be over-prescribed for pain or perimenopause or other well documented women’s health issues. Women are still expected to suffer through things, without any attempt to investigate further, and are generally disbelieved about the severity of pain. Medical groups don’t believe that because they are just not that good at checking they are actually providing good care from the perspective of patient experience. Good luck finding a truly supportive ‘long term GP’. Good luck affording a fantastic care team. Shutting down telehealth providers on the basis women can’t be believed about their own experiences just feels like yet more medical misogyny. The ABC coverage is giving me the ick as it is fundamentally infected with the same problematic attitudes about there not being larger issues in medical care.