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Peptides: where to begin?

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Re: Peptides: where to begin?

#331

Post by allador »

rootusrootus wrote: post #84
cjbgkagh wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought Semaglutide at 50c/mg and had it tested, it's the real deal. What's the normal price, $100/mg? My gf is in medicine so she had a friend test it through their work.

Won't be anywhere near that. I don't have prices handy, but Lilly sells tirzepatide (a bit better than sema, and usually a bit more expensive) at 500/mo (maybe a bit less now on the trump rx site, I don't recall). Depending on dose, that'll be about 10 bucks a mg give or take. At 50c/mg for sema you were paying a bit of a premium. These days even tirz is only about 30-35c/mg.

I'm paying $400/month currently, directly from Eli Lilly.

They drop ship a box containing cold packs and the meds.

You dont need the idiocy of trumprx to get these prices, just go directly to Eli Lilly or Novo Nordisk.

Re: Peptides: where to begin?

#332

Post by allador »

olalonde wrote: post #118
cjbgkagh wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought Semaglutide at 50c/mg and had it tested, it's the real deal. What's the normal price, $100/mg? My gf is in medicine so she had a friend test it through their work.

Last I checked, Ozempic (Semaglutide) is around $1000/month in the US. A typical 1 month pen is 4-8mg, so around $250/mg to $500/mg. So yeah, I may have understated how much cheaper the gray market version is.

This is incorrect.

Tirzepatide is $400-450 (depending on dose) per month directly from Eli Lilly.

https://www.lilly.com/lillydirect/medicines/zepbound

Novo Nordisk's drugs can be had as low as $250/month through third party (which is weird), though they'll probably honor those prices in direct sales before long.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/31/novo-nordisk-wegovy-subscrip...

These are all cash pay prices, no insurance.

Re: Peptides: where to begin?

#333

Post by malfist »

stalfie wrote: post #164
cjbgkagh wrote: post #65

Peptides are a revolution and you don't need to know how they work to know that they work (for various people for various conditions). There is a tension between empiricism and fundamentalism with much of medical science focusing on fundamentalism. Now with the ability to collect and search large amounts of empirical data and communicate it peer-to-peer people are picking up on a lot of things that work without knowi…

Non blinded self experimentation is not a useful branch of empiricism. I had an ME/CFS patient that had tried 100s of things and documented the effects thoroughly. She had a quite impressive list. Roughly 30% had had an effect to begin with, but the trend she observed was that it lasted for around a month at most. Placebo was her overall conclusion, but she occasionally got relief anyways so we both agreed that there…

> Non blinded self experimentation is not a useful branch of empiricism.

Amen to this. The plural of anecdote is not data.

People have been hawking snake oil for centuries, and people have been believing snail oil cured them for centuries.

Re: Peptides: where to begin?

#334

Post by cjbgkagh »

ramraj07 wrote: post #169
cjbgkagh wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought Semaglutide at 50c/mg and had it tested, it's the real deal. What's the normal price, $100/mg? My gf is in medicine so she had a friend test it through their work.

Test what, exactly? Purity? LPS contamination? They cant test for every last picogram of material in it. Did they test for viral contamination? Even drug addicts heat up the thing they inject so theyre actually safer than you can ever be. Dont inject things from China into your blood!

High-Performance Liquid Chromatography so purity and concentration.

Back when I started few people were doing this and it was more of a risk, I was buying from research peptide vendors who had their own testing practices, but now a huge number of people are doing it and there are markets where reputations matter and it appears to be reasonably efficient.

I would prefer not to inject peptides from gray market China but practically all of the gray/black market supply is from there. I will likely switch to pharma grade when generics become available.

Re: Peptides: where to begin?

#335

Post by cjbgkagh »

deaux wrote: post #147
rootusrootus wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC the biggest impetus for cracking down was Lilly throwing a fit about the gray market supplying reta well before it even becomes available via the normal channels (who knows when that will be). But as you say, it just pushes people to buy direct from Chinese vendors (and it is basically impossible to stop direct imports like that). Would be safer if more reputable US-based sellers could supply it semi-openly as b…

> and it is basically impossible to stop direct imports like that How so? Is there a particular characteristic of the US that makes it so, or of the channels through which this is done? I get that in general it's impossible as with recreational drugs, but when you look at cocaine then at least to traffick it to most wealthy countries it takes a large amount of resources and is at high risk of getting caught. Which is…

The US is a rather dysfunctional country along many axis and an inability to stop imports is one of them. The difference between drugs and peptides is that by weight peptides are much more valuable. 1kg of cocaine is $28K, fentanyl is $150K, and semaglutide is $500K.

Re: Peptides: where to begin?

#336

Post by deng »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #329
deng wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it is usually not necessary for approval of a compound to be able to describe how it works on a molecular or cellular level. What you need to show are three things: efficacy, safety and quality, so basically: the compound has the intended clinical benefit, has an acceptable safety profile and can be produced with a consistent manufacturing quality. Most compounds fail because of lack of efficacy (roughly half), a…

The vast majority of drug candidates don’t make it to the trial stage. Much of the research has to be defensible prior to the trial and what makes them defensible is having a mechanism for action. Of course once a drug is being used off label there starts to be some empirical data which can be used for trials, and it seems that we’ll get lucky with GLP1-As.

You are entirely correct. New compounds for trials do not come out of thin air, you usually derive them from compounds you already know how and why they work. For instance, we know very well how Semaglutide works, same goes for many other peptides that are currently being studied. However, you are correct that we do not understand why they would help for ME/CFS, simply because we do not understand ME/CFS in the first place. As I've written above, it's a severely neglected disease.

Anyway, I don't think we really disagree, I rather misunderstood your original post. It's good to hear that these new peptides are helping with your condition, and I wish you all the best!

Re: Peptides: where to begin?

#337

Post by tbojanin »

xarope wrote: post #185
tbojanin wrote: post #21

I tried retatrutide for 10 weeks, here are my results: Before: 5'7, ~182lb Bench 1rm: 315 Squat: 5x10 225 Deadlift: 5x5 315 After: same height lol, 154lb Bench 1rm: 285 Squat: 5x10 205 Deadlift: 5x5 275 Suffered some anhedonia towards the end but that went away ~1wk after stopping. Overall pretty good, not any side effects. Definitely fixed my food craving problem. I didn't have a high intake of protein during the 10…

It's interesting you mention this (anhedonia), since the guardian just published this article: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/apr/06/is-retatruti... How did you actually feel? Disinterested in stuff, ennui, or other?

Yeah, basically disinterested. Somewhat burnt out from doing things I normally love doing such as going on walks, programming on weekends, gaming, and work. It wasn't a really big problem, I only noticed it when looking retroactively at my experience.

Re: Peptides: where to begin?

#339

Post by cjbgkagh »

deng wrote: post #322
cjbgkagh wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doctors have been maligning ME/CFS as psychosamatic for decades and generally still do despite a large amount of modern evidence to the contrary. If you have it it’s clearly not, you can get good and bad days that are clearly not dependent on psychological state. In addition I have it due to hEDS which is a condition that is almost never diagnosed due to aforementioned blind spots. Most doctors still think the preval…

I completely understand your frustration with the lack of knowledge and research in ME/CFS. It's a scandal, given the prevalence and seriousness of the condition. Unfortunately, after Covid, ME/CFS was even more politicized as part of the long-Covid discussions and got caught up in the culture wars. I have several friends with ME/CFS and they basically say the same things you do - ignorant doctors, high cost due to m…

Unless you’ve had ME/CFS you cannot understand how bad it is, I’ve had it and I still have a hard time comprehending how bad it was, I am occasionally reminded and it’s easy to forget. While it won’t kill you it’ll destroy your life until you’re ready to kill yourself.

The UK led the world with explicit psychologizing of it in large part to prevent insurance companies being liable for such an expensive and debilitating condition. A legacy that continues to this day, the main people responsible are still very influential. Fauci was instrumental in diverting research away from the autoimmune aspect and preventing a lot of important research. The $1B set aside for LongCovid appears to largely have been wasted. The official classification for hEDS was explicitly changed to reduce the number found so that it could remain a rare disease and continue to have access to specific funding for rare diseases (goal seeking). I could go on and on. It is a highly dysfunctional industry with many perverse incentives pulling it in all sorts of directions. There was the healthy at any size movement despite obesity being a massive cause for mortality, perhaps the only stronger signal would be smoking and consider how long it took them to figure out smoking.

There have been insanely impressive improvements to medical science but this seems to be largely due to tooling and access to information rather than the lumbering bureaucracy which appears to do very little of benefit.

Re: Peptides: where to begin?

#340

Post by TeMPOraL »

array_key_first wrote: post #326
TeMPOraL wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already left the land of reason far behind by the time OP implied hamburgers and milkshakes give people cancer.

Red meat is a carcinogen, I don't know what to tell you.

Everything is a carcinogen. Even water. Dose matters, and most of the "omg zomg causes cancer if you eat it!" dietary nonsense purposefully omits absolute amounts or base rates, lest you realize it's actually as likely to give you cancer as smiling at people.

I don't know what else to tell you. Except maybe that if one gets this single concept, that quantities matter, it becomes immediately apparent why most of the "healthy eating" / fitness fads is just pure bullshit.

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