In the last week, both the Tamron Hall show and the New York Post featured stories about people who’d been injured in their weight loss-GLP1 treatments.
Now Brad Roberts is suing Dr. Tony Puopolo, who he alleges over-prescribed a combination of “overlapping” drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro.
Roberts has never met Puopolo in person according to a complaint filed in the Southern District of New York. Roberts found him through an outfit called LifeMD, a telehealth company he worked for at the time and then left — contentiously– when he became ill. Roberts says they never had any kind of follow up.
Roberts, who was very overweight, shed pounds quickly and became a spokesperson for the company, even making a successful commercial.
But he says in the complain that to keep the weight loss going fast between November 2022 and November 2023, Puopolo “over-tritrated” him, upping the dosage to the point where it made him extremely ill. He says he lost a whopping 143 pounds in six months, going from 300 to 157.
In the complaint, Roberts says Puopolo “did not follow the manufacturer prescribing and titration guidelines. The titration of a GLP-1 regulates the dosage to the patient. In addition to the GLP-1s, Dr. Puopolo prescribed non-FDA approved synthetic compound peptides to enhance the speed of Brad Roberts’s weight-loss. Dr. Puopolo’s combining experimental peptides and weight loss medications with GLP-1s caused debilitating injuries.”
Roberts isn’t suing LifeMD, but says he was assigned to the doctor through the telehealth service. He says in the complaint “Neither Dr. Puopolo nor anyone else affiliated with the Defendant conducted formal clinical follow-ups while prescribing GLP-1s and other weight-loss drugs to Brad Roberts.”
LifeMD trades on the NASDAQ for about $4.55. It hit a high on February 19th of $8.54. There’s an earnings call this afternoon at 4:30pm in which they’ll have to explain what’s going on.
For Roberts, his is a cautionary tale for people not in Hollywood, where these injections of weight loss medications have run rampant. (During awards season I ran into people who no longer looked like themselves! They were shrunk!)
Roberts says his injuries — especially to his inner ear — led him to six surgeries.(see below)
Patients always think the doctors they’re dealing with know what they’re doing. But Roberts says in his complaint that the “GLP-1 regimen exceeded the manufacturer recommended guidelines and conflicted and/or overlapped with other prescription drugs” prescribed by Puopolo.
Roberts’ case file is already full of affidavits backing him including one from Andrea Danielle Brown, the former HR person at LifeMD who’s since left the company and fully vouches for him. (See part of her affidavit below).
Here’s Roberts’ informercial, which I found online:
More to come…
