Some patients want to take a holiday pause on diabetes or weight-loss drugs. Here’s what doctors say they need to know

Around the holidays – when many people are baking cookies for Santa, enjoying cocktail parties or having festive family feasts – some adults who use popular medications for diabetes or weight loss might explore skipping a dose for a week or two because they want to fully delight in their favorite foods, or just save some money.

Around the holidays, when many people are baking cookies for Santa, enjoying cocktail parties or having festive family feasts, some adults who use popular medications for diabetes or weight loss explore skipping doses for a week or two. These medications can suppress appetite or sometimes cause uncomfortable side effects that some people might want to avoid during the holiday season. And according to some doctors, some of their patients have said they want to fully delight in their favorite foods or just save some money during a season of high spending. “People are bound to wonder about doing this,” said Dr. Judith Korner, professor of medicine in the Division of Endocrinology at New York Presbyterian/ Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York. “Sometimes they think about it if they’re going on a cruise or a vacation,” she said. “I have patients who are in the other situation, where they have been going up on the medication and we have kept them at their current dose and we’re not escalating during the holidays.” Dr. Alyssa Dominguez, an endocrinologist with Keck Medicine of USC in Los Angeles, says some of her patients also ask about pausing doses during the holidays. “Patients have come to me asking about skipping doses of these medications around the holidays, around vacations. Another thing that often comes up is delay of either starting the medication or escalating the dose of a medication,” Dominguez said.