What MINSA's 2025 warning about weight-loss clinics actually said

What the document is

On 28 October 2025 the Ministry of Health published an Advertencia Sanitaria sobre Promoción y Aplicación de Medicamentos Inyectables para Bajar de Peso en Clínicas de Nutrición — a health warning about the promotion and application of injectable weight‑loss medicines in nutrition clinics. It names semaglutide, tirzepatide, cagrilintide and liraglutide.

A sanitary warning is not a new law and not a ban. It is the regulator restating duties that already exist under the Ley General de Salud, aimed at a practice it has decided has drifted. That is why nothing about it changed the availability of these medicines: they were registered before it and they are registered after it.

What it objects to

• Promoting injectable weight‑loss programmes on social media.
• Use without supervision, or use that is excessive, cosmetic, or without proper evaluation.
• Application by establishments or personnel who are not authorised to do it.

Read as a group, those three describe one business model rather than one medicine: an advertisement, a walk‑in, an injection, no assessment, nobody medically responsible afterwards.

What it requires

• Prescribed only by a physician, after an individual assessment.
• Administered by a properly accredited medical professional.
• Valid Costa Rican sanitary registration for the product.
• An unbroken cold chain, from import through to administration.
• The patient told the brand, the active ingredient and the registration number.

That last requirement is the most useful line in the document for anybody choosing between clinics, because it is a test you can apply in thirty seconds. Ask for all three. If a provider cannot give them, whatever you are being offered is not a registered medicine, and the conversation is over.

The second warning, in July 2026

A separate warning dated 23 July 2026 covers unregistered peptides and names retatrutide, tesamorelin, BPC‑157, TB‑500 and GHK‑Cu. These are not the same situation as the GLP‑1 medicines above. They hold no Costa Rican registration, which means no dossier has been assessed here for quality, safety or efficacy.

The same document confirms something people often get wrong in the other direction: magistral preparation remains legal — a licensed pharmacy compounding a medicine for one named patient against one individual prescription. What is prohibited is manufacturing to hold inventory, commercialising at scale, and advertising the compounded preparation to the public.

So a compounded preparation is not automatically illegitimate, and a registered medicine is not automatically well used. The line is drawn around the practice, not around the molecule.

Why the regulator chose promotion as the target

It is worth noticing what the Ministry did not do. It did not restrict prescribing, did not add a specialist gate, did not deregister anything. Every one of its objections is about the path a patient takes to the medicine: who advertised it, who decided it was appropriate, and who was in the room when it was given.

That tells you what the regulator believes is going wrong, and it is a reasonable belief. A medicine prescribed after an assessment and a medicine sold from an advertisement can be the same medicine at the same dose, and they are not the same treatment.

What to do with it as a patient

1. Ask for the brand, the active ingredient and the registration number, before anything else.
2. Ask who assessed you, and when — before the medicine was offered, or after.
3. Ask where it is dispensed and how it was kept cold.
4. If something is compounded, ask who it was compounded for. The answer should be your name.

None of this says whether any of these medicines is right for you. That depends on your own measurements, your history and a physician's judgement, which is the point the Ministry was making in the first place.