Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of Public Citizens’ Health Research Group, has never met a drug he didn’t hate. Now, Dr. Wolfe is grabbing headlines with his group’s petition to the FDA calling for the ban of orlistat, a weight-loss drug, which may be purchased over-the-counter. Xenical (the same drug in a higher dose), is available by prescription only and was approved in 1999. He also wants to ban Alli, an over-the-counter therapy approved in 2007. These drugs have been taken by an estimated 40 million people worldwide.
This is Public Citizen’s second petition to the FDA asking the agency to ban these drugs, citing severe side effects that include liver damage, pancreatitis and kidney stones. But so far, there have only been 47 reported cases of acute pancreatitis and 73 cases of kidney stones, which out of 40 million patients, “does not seem like grounds for restrictions,” says ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross.
And out of the less severe side effects, including diarrhea and stool leakage, Dr. Donal Hensrud, associate professor of nutrition and preventive medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, explains that the longer a patient stays on the medication, the more likely the symptoms will fade. “Only about 20 percent of people get those side effects, and in most people, it lasts for less than a week.”
Not only are we yet again disappointed with Dr. Wolfe’s anti-drug propaganda, we also have a bone to pick with ABC’s Lara Salahi, who reported on this news story. She described that orlistat drugs work by “blocking absorption of about a third of fat enzymes that enter the body” and that they also “block fat-soluble vitamins including vitamins A, B, and K.”
“Where do I begin?” asks Dr. Ross. “These medications do block lipase to some extent, but they do not block ‘fat enzymes’ entering the body. Nor do they block fat-soluble vitamins. Some of these vitamins are lost with excreted fat, meaning they are not absorbed, but Vitamin B is not one of these vitamins, since despite what Ms. Salahi writes, it is not fat-soluble. In addition, she also states that the FDA removed weight-loss drugs Qnexa and Meridia from the market in 2010, but Qnexa was never even on the market! This reporter needs to get her facts straight.”
“In today’s market, there are so few pharmaceutical tools at our disposal to help fight the obesity epidemic, therefore, it’s disappointing, but not surprising, that Dr. Wolfe would take on this petition on the basis of very little data,” says ACSH's Dr. Elizabeth Whelan. “The mechanism for these drugs is not complicated, though Dr. Wolfe seems to make it so. He keeps harping on the risks associated with the use of orlistat, but how does that relate to the even more severe risks of obesity?”