Pharmacies will be more hesitant to sell it to normal weight people...

The weight loss drug Xenical that is made by Roche Pharmaceuticals is all over the news again in Australia. The reason this time is that the adverts that allowed it to be advertised on TV have been pulled. Xenical that is not a prescription drug in Australia has hardly been out of the papers after it was given the go ahead for advertising on TV in 2006 and also when an undercover operation exposed that the majority of pharmacies were selling the drug to normal weight people when it should only be given to overweight or obese people.

Roche are not taking this latest ruling lying down and have criticised the Government's National Drugs and Poisons Schedule Committee saying that it had now placed Xenical on the same level as hundreds of other untested and bogus weight loss medications that are on the market. They argued that Xenical has undergone thousands of hours of proper clinical treatments and thus it should not be grouped in the same category as medicines that have no proper approval and testing and thus Xenical should be allowed to be advertised on television to help obese people.

In one way however Roche can be thankful that the NDPSC did not recommend that the orlistat drug be made a prescription drug again and so it can still be sold freely at pharmacies. It is likely however that pharmacies will be more hesitant to sell it to normal weight people now after all this fuss has been made.

At Ukmedix News we continue to believe that the Xenical medication should only be given out with a prescription and should not be available over the counter. It is when Xenical is abused that it causes unpleasant side effects and not when it is used correctly and under a doctors supervision.