Georgia Board of Nursing falls for pharma trickery

This is the kind of thing that frustrates the bejeezus out of us: having to (politely!) point out to a regulatory body that they’ve fallen for Big Pharma’s misrepresentations. In this case it was the Georgia Board of Nursing, which forwarded to its members a letter from Eli Lilly — a message that overstates, distorts, and tells lies about compounded GLP1s.

You can guess what Lilly said: That the ending of the tirzepatide injection shortage means all compounded tirzepatide formulations are unlawful or inappropriate. “This,” we wrote to the BoN “is false.”

Unfortunately, the board didn’t bother to verify whether what Lilly said was true before passing it on to its members — just what the drugmaker hoped it would do. Thus Georgia nurses have been given incorrect information by their own professional board, and APC has to do its best to clean up the mess.

It’s the kind of sharing-without-checking we would expect on social media (“Did you hear that Taylor Swift had her toes surgically shortened?”), not from a professional medical organization. And it’s the kind of error that can hurt patients, “discouraging appropriate prescribing of compounded medications even when they are both necessary and lawful.”