NHS FAILINGS ARE DRIVING A DANGEROUS NEW HEALTH TREND AMONG THE YOUNG
Early last month, in the name of friendship, I fought my way into a blockaded London to cheer on my friends running in the London half-marathon. I had a sign in hand, with “Don’t trip” written in thick red marker. Just weeks later, I did it all over again for friends running the full marathon.
To make it clear, I am not against running at all. I often do 5km runs and never endeavour to do more than that. But for many, what started as a simple fitness journey with the benefit of increased endorphins has become littered with exercises I can’t pronounce.
Britain is in a fitness boom. Gym memberships hit a record 12.2 million last year. Health and fitness clubs recorded 679 million visits in 2025. That’s nearly double the number of visits to GPs. Oura rings and Fitbits track sleep. Protein shakes have replaced pints. Cold plunges, infrared saunas, red-light therapies and IV drips have migrated to high-street gyms and at-home remedies. And it won’t stop there.
What I’m highlighting isn’t new. But it is becoming more extreme. In the US, where many can’t afford a health hiccup, the latest fixation is biohacking. Also known as “DIY biology”, biohacking is a form of personal improvement where people attempt to change aspects of their biology to improve their health without the supervision of medical professionals.
One way they are doing so is by injecting peptides – short-chain amino acids that act as signalling molecules in the body. Insulin is a peptide, and so are some weight-loss treatments like Ozempic. But the peptides driving the current craze are different. Compounds like BPC-157 and TB-500 have been flooding US markets despite never having been approved for human use anywhere in the world, let alone passing clinical trials. The evidence is almost entirely derived from rodent studies, and yet people in the US are willing to take the risk.
So, the US is sneezing. Is the UK about to catch a cold?
In the US, where a hospital visit can leave you out of pocket, the incentive to self-treat and prevent is obvious. Britain, on the other hand, has a universal healthcare system. In theory, you shouldn’t need to inject yourself with an untested compound to fix or prevent a dodgy knee. In practice, seven million people are on waiting lists, the 18-week treatment target hasn’t been met since 2016, and an increasing number of young people are choosing to go private.
When people lose faith that the NHS will treat them in time, they look elsewhere. Some go private. Some turn to Google. And, increasingly, some end up on grey-market websites ordering compounds that have never been tested on a human being.
Grey-market peptides are sold online in the UK plastered with a “for research purposes only” label. A transparent fiction, since those same websites carry dosing guides and before-and-after photos. Private clinics offer peptide therapies behind patient disclaimers, with consultations starting at £200 and annual costs stretching into the thousands. The ambiguity of safety is obvious, yet people still choose next-day delivery.
We can’t pretend that the people turning to peptides are simply gullible or reckless. They are making a rational calculation. When your GP says your physio referral will take months, and someone online says two injections and cold plunges fixed their knee in two weeks, it’s easy to pick the only option that doesn’t keep you waiting. That is not a failure of individual judgment. It is what happens when a health system breaks its side of the bargain so consistently that people would rather explore new and as yet unproven alternatives.
This is the broader story that peptides and other biohacking techniques fit into. It is the same impulse that drove over 900,000 people to access weight-loss treatments privately in 2025, the same frustration behind the surge in private ADHD assessments, and the reason people are buying setups to do IV drip infusions at home. One of the touts of bigwigs in Whitehall is that the NHS is fantastic for emergency treatments. So the message is: only use the National Health Service when you are on the brink of expiring; for anything else, fend for yourself.
The biohacking movement, of which peptides are the latest frontier, is built entirely on that message being received loud and clear. People are not necessarily rejecting medical expertise. They are rejecting a safety net with holes too big and, as a result, trying creative alternatives. It could be a good thing, innovation is, on aggregate, usually not bad, but it does speak to a wider trend of the NHS losing the faith of the people it is supposed to serve. And it’s getting to the point that people will try anything else, tested or not.
2026-05-05T14:15:41Z
