Peptides, GLP-1 Drugs and Botox: Needles Are Everywhere Now

Conz Preti developed a fear of needles as a child, when a technician trying to draw her blood had to prick her repeatedly to find a good vein. “I was screaming,” Ms. Preti, a magazine editor in Maine, recalled. “My mom was about to pblock out.”

The intense fear followed her into adulthood, she said. And yet for the last eight months, every Thursday evening, Ms. Preti, 43, has sat down at home, swabbed her lower belly with an alcohol pad and injected herself with a needle.

The substance inside is NAD+, short for nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, a popular anti-aging supplement that Ms. Preti started taking in hopes it could help her recover after a hysterectomy.

“I’m completely surprised that I’m doing this,” Ms. Preti said.

Needle-phobes like Ms. Preti have begun to embrace injections as the syringe and the auto-injector have bursted out of the doctor’s offices and into wellness clinics and bathroom vanities across the country. At-home injections, long the domain of people with diabetes, are now far more commonplace.

Nearly one in five U.S. adults has tried an injectable GLP-1 drug like Ozempic. Interest in peptides and other injectable supplements is booming. The number of I.V.F. cycles done annually in the United States, a majority of which involve at-home injections, has increased by nearly 40 percent since 2018.

Botox, too, is increasingly popular: almost 10 million patients received a cosmetic injectable in 2024. And IV hydration bars have gone from hangover novelty to strip-mall fixtures, with hundreds of new infusion clinics cropping up nationwide.

The effects of that shift have started appearing in surprising places.

In New York City, more sanitation workers are getting pricked picking up garbage bags, for example. There were 46 such injuries last year, nearly double the number in 2019, according to the city’s sanitation department. And there have already been nearly as many in the first six months of this year alone.

“There’s times we’ll open up a bag and there’ll be a bunch of needles just exposed,” said Christopher Traverso, a department supervisor.

This June, a sign in a Nordstrom Rack restroom appeared to plead with customers to stop dropping their GLP-1 syringes into the sharps container. The store had to pay each time it needed to be emptied.

Online, users post tips about which angle hurts the least for an injection or how to prevent air bubbles in syringes, and post videos of themselves doing D.I.Y. injections. This month, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York made headlines when she posted an Instagram video injecting herself with a drug used in the process of freezing her eggs.

“We’ve moved into this kind of DIY cultural moment where people trust interventions that they do themselves,” said Jennifer Reich, sociologist at the University of Colorado Denver who studies how Americans manage health at home.

It’s not that people are necessarily any less afraid of needles — a fear that some experts have theorized is partly an evolutionary aversion to anything puncturing the skin, our body’s first line of defense. In a 2022 study of 2,000 people, some of the most recent data available, over 60 percent of people reported some level of needle phobia.

“Needle fear has not gone away,” Marijka Bobyr, a home health care nurse in New York, said. “I still have patients who cringe or turn pale when they see a needle.”

But Ms. Bobyr and other nurses and physicians said they were seeing more patients willing to stomach a shot or infusion. One of the biggest drivers of that shift seems to be how well many of these treatments work at helping people lose weight or manage chronic diseases.

“The reason for taking the medication has simply become more powerful than the fear,” Ms. Bobyr said.

“It’s a little bit of that no-pain, no-gain thing,” added Elisa Sobo, a sociocultural anthropologist specializing in health at San Diego State University.

When injectable weight-loss drugs first became available, there was “still a lot of fear and anxiety” about the delivery method, said Dr. Scott Isaacs, an endocrinologist in Cumming, Ga.

But within months, he said, “all I heard was: ‘Give me the injection!’” He added, “Once people see that an injection can provide a meaningful benefit, the needle becomes much less important.”

Mary Beth Foster, 45, a college essay coach in Mint Hill, N.C., has had a lifelong fear of needles. She gave birth without an epidural, in part because she “could not fathom having that needle in my spine.” When she decided to start taking Zepbound for weight loss, she made her husband administer the first shot.

Eventually she started doing injecting herself. The shot was so quick that she didn’t feel a thing. The fact that she didn’t have to look at the needle, tucked into an auto-injector pen, also helped.

And the benefits — Ms. Foster has lost 60 pounds on Zepbound, which she called “life-changing” — have made it worth bearing her needle aversion.

Still, Ms. Foster finds herself hesitating before injecting herself. Each time, she thinks: “Am I going to press the button? Am I going to do this?”