Assessed. Prescribed. Monitored. Peptide programmes.

Peptides are short chains of amino acids. Your body makes thousands of them and uses them to carry instructions between cells. Some can be prescribed as medicines. Which ones, for whom, and whether any of it is right for you is a clinical decision, made at your assessment.

You will notice this page does not tell you the name of the medicine or what is in it. That is deliberate, and there are two reasons.

The first is the law. South African medicines law is strict about how prescription treatments may be described to the public, and stricter still for medicines a pharmacy prepares for one named patient. Where the law is not clear cut, we take the careful route rather than the clever one.

The second reason matters more. What a treatment might do for you depends on your history, your examination and your results, and read cold off a web page that is easy to misread and easy to talk yourself into. Nothing is being kept from you. Your doctor will go through all of it, including exactly what you are being prescribed and why, before you decide anything.

Our doctors prescribe from a defined set of compounded peptide medicines, prepared by a licensed South African pharmacy against an individual prescription. Your doctor will discuss the specific options available to you during your assessment.

You do not have to know. Book an assessment and tell your doctor what has brought you in. Working out which programme fits you, or whether none of them does, is their job and it is what the consultation is for.

No. If treatment is not right for you, your doctor will tell you so and explain why. You still get the assessment and the answers you came for, and if your doctor does not put you on a treatment plan, we will see you again free of charge in six months to check whether anything has changed.

Everything we prescribe is a prescription medicine, prepared for you personally by a licensed South African pharmacy against a prescription from a doctor registered with the HPCSA. Nothing is sold over the counter, and nothing is dispensed without a consultation.

These are compounded medicines rather than mass-produced ones, which means each is prepared for an individual patient rather than manufactured in batches with an approved package insert. Compounding is a long-established part of South African pharmacy practice. It also means these are not registered products in the way a medicine on a pharmacy shelf is registered, and your doctor will explain exactly what that means for you before you decide anything.

Only you and your doctor. Your consultation, your treatment plan and your deliveries are private, your information is confidential, and your packaging is plain and unmarked. Nothing on the outside says what is inside.

Cover varies between schemes and depends on the treatment, so some plans may contribute and others will not. Speak to your medical aid before you assume either way.

It might, which is exactly what the consultation is for. Come prepared with a list of everything you take, including anything you bought over the counter and anything you only take occasionally. Your doctor will ask, and the answer can change what they are able to prescribe you safely.

A lot of people do. It is cheaper and nobody asks any questions. The difference is that here a doctor decides whether you should be on anything at all, chooses the dose for you, and checks how you are doing. Buy it yourself and nobody does any of that. You are also trusting a substance of unknown origin, prepared by someone unnamed, to a standard nobody has checked, and injecting it into yourself. These are prescription medicines. They are prescription medicines because they need a doctor.