People Say These Peptides Hurt Them. Their Stories Are Muffled in MAHA’s Push for Medical Freedom.

After the third day of squirting an experimental drug up his nose, Dylan Meetze felt horrible. “It was like I was underwater, like it took the most to do anything,” he said. Meetze stopped taking the drug but endured fatigue and anxiety for months afterward, and his eyes and muscles twitched, he said. He had taken BPC-157, a peptide drug popularized by podcasts about wellness, longevity, and what’s called “body optimization.” “Peptide” is a general term for substances that are smaller than proteins but composed of the same building blocks. Dozens of peptide drugs, including insulin and GLP-1 weight loss medicines, have garnered approval by the Food and Drug Administration. But BPC-157 and many others have not because they haven’t undergone clinical trials. This fact hasn’t stopped online influencers from promoting them as remedies for muscle injuries, gut issues, covid, and more. Use of BPC-157 is growing in the U.S., particularly among white males, according to a new analysis of millions of de-identified electronic health records. Since 2020, the analysis, which hasn’t yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, found that more than 1,000 people told doctors they had used the d...