That compares with 7,546 for the diet drug Meridia in its first four weeks and 367,857 for the wildly popular impotence drug Viagra, according to IMS Health, a health care information company. Diet doctors say some patients are using Xenical with no problems. Others have stopped because of side effects. He was the lead investigator for a large Xenical study. With Xenical, there's a matured interest.
People seem to know more about it.
They seem to know it's not a magic bullet, that the weight-loss effects are modest. Larry Richardson, the president of the American Society of Bariatric Physicians and a diet doctor in Houston and Plano, Texas, says he writes 15 to 20 Xenical prescriptions a week. About half of his current patients are asking about the drug, although they're not all requesting it. Richard Bowen, a family practitioner specializing in obesity medicine in Naples, says he has 200 patients on Xenical. Many of Bowen's patients continued using the appetite suppressant phentermine, the half of the fen-phen combination that's still on the market, but they were not continuing to lose weight.