Posts shared in the Philippines falsely claim 'diabetes drug metformin is deadly'

"Metformin is not the solution for diabetics!" reads part of a lengthy Tagalog-language post shared on Facebook on April 15, 2023.

It claims to share purported comments from Filipino doctor Willie Ong warning against metformin.

The oral drug is used to treat type 2 diabetes, a condition that results in the body being unable to regulate the level of sugar in the blood (archived link).

Over time, it can lead to serious damage to the heart, blood vessels, eyes, kidneys and nerves.

The false post claims Ong said: "Metformin is the way towards sickness and early death; not towards becoming well. If you have type 2 diabetes and your doctor prescribed metformin, you should change your physician right away."

It goes on to say the drug has "fatal side effects" including certain types of cancer, blindness, kidney stones and liver disease.

The post concludes by misleadingly suggesting Ong recommended a product called "GlucoPro" instead of metformin.

Ong is a well-known Filipino cardiologist -- not an endocrinologist as the post claims -- who regularly gives medical advice to his more than 17 million followers on Facebook (archived link).

He has been a frequent target of misinformation debunked by AFP here, here and here.

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Screenshot of the false post taken on May 3, 2023

Identical posts were also shared on Facebook here and here while similar false claims were shared here and here touting another product called "FibreLife".

But multiple endocrinologists -- doctors who specialise in hormone diseases including diabetes -- told AFP the posts actually contradict decades of health data about metformin.

'Effective' diabetes drug

"Metformin is an effective medication for diabetes. It lowers blood sugar which can help prevent complications," Dr Iris Isip Tan of the Philippine General Hospital in the capital Manila said on May 3, 2023.

"Persons with diabetes may have shorter life expectancy because of complications."

She shared a link to a landmark diabetes study that ran from 1977 to 1997 in the United Kingdom which found metformin appears to decrease the risk of diabetes-related deaths in overweight patients (archived links here and here).

The study said the drug "may be the first-line pharmacological therapy of choice" for these patients as metformin is associated with less weight gain than other diabetes medications such as insulin and sulphonylureas.

Citing the medical journal Diabetologia, Dr Tan added that metformin -- which can cause minor side effects such as abdominal discomfort and diarrhoea -- has been used to treat diabetes for more than 60 years with "no major safety issues" (archived link).

Dr John Paul Bagos, a board-certified endocrinologist at the Novaliches General Hospital, separately refuted claims about metformin's purported side effects listed in the posts.

"Metformin does not cause kidney or liver damage, kidney stones, cancers, hypertension and blindness," he told AFP on May 3, 2023. "Uncontrolled diabetes would actually be the reason for these conditions mentioned. It's not the other way around."

The US National Library of Medicine says metformin can "rarely" cause a life-threatening condition called lactic acidosis (archived link), however, doctors will endeavour to avoid this by conducting pre-treatment tests on their patients before monitoring how they respond to the drug.

Fabricated message

In two separate posts on his verified Facebook page, Dr Willie Ong said the claim circulating online was "fake news".

"This is the truth: metformin is okay. Believe your doctors," he said in a Tagalog-language post on April 21, 2023 (archived link).

In a Facebook video shared on the same day, he cited previous posts in which he referred to metformin as an effective medication for diabetes (archived link).

Multiple keyword searches on the Philippine Food and Drug Administration's database have not found a registration for "GlucoPro", an untested product which AFP has previously debunked false adverts for.

"FibreLife", the other product touted as a diabetes treatment in some of the posts, is listed with the FDA as a "food supplement with no approved therapeutic claims" (archived link).