Before anything else: this is Türkiye. Pharmacy dispensing rules, how strictly prescription requirements are enforced, and what a community pharmacy sells all differ from the United States, and nothing here describes American pharmacy practice [1]. What it does describe is demand, and demand behaves similarly everywhere — the US version of the same pressure is visible in who the price filtered out.
Of the requests pharmacists reported fielding, 82.6% for semaglutide and 79.4% for liraglutide were for weight loss rather than diabetes — 82.6% vs 79.4% between the two drugs, on a 25-item knowledge instrument scored at a mean of 15.8 (SD 4.3). More than 60% of those requests came without a prescription and more than 35% without any medical recommendation at all. Over 60% of pharmacists said they perceived misuse of both drugs.
That trying is the part that transfers. The same impulse — wanting the drug, not wanting the consultation — is what sustains the market for products sold without prescriptions, and what happened when researchers watched people try to use one of those products is in fifteen of thirty-four steps. A pharmacy counter is a far safer place to be turned down than a website.
The knowledge finding needs its scale stated to mean anything. Pharmacists scored 15.8 out of 25 on a questionnaire the researchers built for this study, which has no external benchmark, so “moderate” is the authors’ characterization rather than a measured standard. What is more concrete is the pattern: 85.6% correctly identified semaglutide as a GLP-1 drug, but gaps remained in regulatory awareness and in the consistency of routine counseling.
For a reader here the useful inference is about where advice comes from. A pharmacist is often the only healthcare professional in the chain who sees what someone is actually taking, and this survey suggests that counseling varies substantially even among people qualified to give it. That matches what patients describe about clinical support in what patients said when asked, and it is why the support question in every drug worked better with support attached is worth asking of a seller before buying.