Doctor’s warning over booming peptides trend

For the believers, peptides are a modern medical miracle, the easy answer to so many health concerns.

Want to lose weight? No worries, there’s a peptide for that. Need to slow the ageing process? Take a peptide.

It’s the same if you want to heal faster from injuries, achieve shinier hair or even a better tan.

But there are very serious caveats.

Most peptides in Australia are illegal and only available on the black market.

And doctors and scientists warn not enough research has been done on them yet. 

But for anyone who thinks that’s enough to slow down their uptake, this story is a frightening injection of truth.

Most peptides are illegal here because no-one can say for sure what’s in them, or what all the risks may be.

Australians are resorting to online black markets and the surprising ease in which they’re doing it is concerning. Countless websites illegally sell and import peptides into Australia.

Influencers injecting peptides promise everything from healing and weight loss to healthier skin and hair, even a better tan.

It sounds too good to be true and it is, if you ask Dr Mark Putland, the head of emergency medicine at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.

He knows the harm peptides can cause when they’re either used incorrectly, or a bad batch.

“They are awful. They’re vomiting, terrible abdominal and chest pain, sometimes really relentless vomiting, dehydration, sometimes diarrhoea with that as well,” he told 60 Minutes.

“ … We’ve seen diseases like pancreatitis, which is an inflammation of the pancreas, a key abdominal digestive organ that can actually be fatal, when it gets out of control. 

“We’ve seen people, patients with cardiac arrhythmias or heart arrhythmias.”

Putland believes no-one should be thinking of peptides as some kind of panacea until they’ve undergone the same stringent testing and oversight expected of pharmaceutical drugs.

He said many of them would “form part of our future medication armamentarium without doubt” but they were being “grossly misused”.

“You wouldn’t walk into your grandmother’s medicine cabinet and pick a handful of her blood pressure tablets and just swallow them all without thought. It’d be very bad for you,” he said.

“You’d feel awful afterwards. It might kill you.”

US celebrity plastic surgeon Dr Terry Dubrow is also well aware of the dangers but says that doesn’t seem to be having much effect on users.

Peptides are more accessible in the US thanks to a legal loophole. They can be imported, sold and used under the guise of being for “research purposes”.

“The danger is you don’t know what the ingredients are,” he said.

“Studies have been done of some of the peptides in this country and up to 70 per cent of them don’t actually have the ingredient that they’re purported to have. 

“And worse, they have heavy metals, some have toxins, some have adulterants or even exotoxins that can be very, very dangerous.”

The way Dubrow sees it, whether you like it or not, the floodgates have opened with peptides. 

“They’re here to stay. This is the future of medicine without a doubt,” he said.

“The problem is there’s basically two general types of peptides. There are the approved ones and the most common is, of course, the GLP-1 drugs, the Ozempics, the Mounjaros.

“And then there’s all of the unapproved ones that have never been studied that may induce tumour growth, that may cause problems down the line.

“But the cat’s out of the bag, people are not going to stop using peptides.”

Dr Tim Piatkowski at the University of Queensland is aware of how perilous Australia’s obsession with the peptide black market has become.

While most are banned here, they’re clearly still getting through. He’s testing illegally imported peptides so he can at least tell people which ones are contaminated.

Piatkowski set up a peptide-use hotline he said was getting as many as 10 calls a day, including from a 16-year-old wanting to inject themselves with multiple peptides to lose weight.

Putland called for better regulation and enforcement while cracking down on the “dodgy operators” selling them.

Dubrow argued that approach didn’t work in the US and wouldn’t work in Australia.

“So you either let them loose on the black market or put them back in the hands of physicians and let us use them in our practice,” he said.

“It’s better to study them, use them, figure it out, or restrict them at your own peril.”

It’s a complicated debate, but one thing they agree on is that more careful studies are required. 

The Therapeutic Goods Administration has issued repeated warnings about the contents and  safety of peptides, especially ones that are bought through the internet, and come from overseas.

Watch the full episode of 60 Minutes on 9Now.