Self-injecting feels like a scary, painful, dangerous procedure and becomes completely boring by the third repetition.
Source: I took compounded Mounjaro and compounded Ozempic/semaglutide.
Just one little clap sound, you feel a little pat on your arm, and the sensor's already made it where it needed to with no pain.
When you remove the sensor it's a little bit of a shock when you see the sensor wire and realize just how small it was and how you never felt it run around inside your arm for a couple weeks.
and, for me, its always been the needle moving around thats been mentally disturbing. digging around vecause they missed for the blood draw, trying to hold a large vaccination dose steady as it needs to be injected over 20seconds. So, I suspect the speed itself reduces discomfort.
Heroin addicts and presumably anyone else who frequently injects into a vein can cause damage to the veins.
But in either case, the answer for subcutaneous injections using needles sized 29g and smaller is no.
I don't know the pharmacokinetics of GLP-1 drugs but my guess is that they don't have the same sort of effects on SC tissue?
Before I had a CGM I did somewhere around 20,000 blood glucose tests over the course of a decade using about 1 cm^2 of forearm and the skin there is clearly not in great shape -- but it's worsened on the level of "looks like the skin of someone who is a decade older or spent too long in the sun" rather than anything medically problematic.
They do, but nothing like insulin does. GLP-1 drugs are more centrally and viscerally active than subcutaneously active, so the effects locally are more related to the physics of injecting solutions subcutaneously than the drugs themselves. They're also much smaller doses than are needed for insulin in general, so the volume averaged over a week is pretty tiny.
Also, as a result of the relative lack of local activity, injection sites are basically unlimited (anywhere from above the knee to above the elbow, except the neck) without fear of lipohypertrophy in the local area.
I really don’t understand this phobia of needles at all. After two days with one system or the other, you get used to it—there’s no pain, it’s just a mental issue of “having to make the gesture.”
My friends used to laugh at how normal it was for me to inject insulin outside a restaurant, while walking, chatting, and smoking at the same time.