Doctor who 'looked different race' using Melanotan II 20 years ago still suffers extreme lifelong side effect
A doctor who drastically darkened his skin using an unlicensed synthetic peptide two decades ago has revealed that he is still living with the consequences today.
Michael Mrozinski, who is better known online as Dr Michael, is on a mission to ward off 'impressionable teenagers' who might be considering injecting themselves with Melanotan II.
He's been there, done that and has a horde of pictures showing his skin sporting an orange glow to prove it - and 20 years on from his use of the artificial substance, it has still left a lasting imprint on his body.
Little research has been conducted into the long-term consequences of using Melanotan II in a bid to look bronzed, but Dr Michael's experience can offer us an idea of how the ramifications might persist long after use stops.
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Speaking to LADbible, he explained that he 'stupidly' started using the stuff while he was a 'young and naive' medical student after being introduced to it by blokes at the gym he attended.
The Scottish social media star, who boasts hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok, explained one vial cost him just £20 - which was a small price to pay for what he thought was an intense tan 'with no downsides'.
Like any good aspiring medic would, Dr Michael decided to do some research into the strange substance he was thinking about injecting himself with and found another form of it, Melanotan I, had been 'licensed in Italy'.
"Melanotan I had approval in Italy for a very, very, very, rare skin condition," he said. "So I looked into the data and my thinking was, 'Right, it’s been licensed for something there, so it must have a bit of a safety profile.
"At the time, I was thinking that Melanotan I and Melanotan II are going to be very similar. But they are very different compounds. So I ended up - stupidly - getting a vial from one of the guys at the gym.
"It was very underground, hush hush. My risk appetite is very low when it comes to a lot of stuff that bodybuilders use, I was never into steroids or anything like that. But for this I was like, it makes sense."
The health expert, who is now based in Australia, said he realises a lot of people in the medical sphere wouldn't admit to doing something like this, but he believes his honesty might stop others from making the same mistake.
Explaining what the first phase of becoming a Melanotan II user involved, Dr Michael said: "I did an injection every single night for a week, that was called a loading dose. I felt horrendous after it."
"About an hour after I did the injections, I would get flushing around my chest and face," he explained. "My face would feel like it was beetroot red, it was like a beacon, just throbbing. Then there was the nausea as well.
"It was doing a lot more stuff to my body than what it was supposed to be doing," he said, explaining that he was also experiencing an 'embarrassing' amount of erections due to taking Melanotan II.
Dr Michael also believes that the unapproved, illegal, and risky peptide also has a psychological impact on users, as he thinks it 'completely warps' the way someone sees themself in the mirror.
He experienced a phenomenon known as 'tanorexia', which essentially describes an addiction to darkening your skin.
"It changes you physically and a lot of people get obsessed with that," Dr Michael said. "You go from looking in the mirror and going, I look like a completely different race right now, to a point in the future where you look at yourself and still think that you could be darker. I went from being really white, not far off ginger to looking like I could have been from South America."
Physical and mental impact of taking Melanotan II
"I had black hair, a black beard, my eyes got darker, everything was darker. It was absolutely crazy. Then the psychology of seeing yourself change…being tanned is associated with being fit and healthy, so people give me really good compliments - and then when you come off of it, you know you're not looking yourself, and you're like wow this is hard. So it's not only the physical, but the psychological stuff - it's hard.
"Nobody talks about that. You can look amazing while you’re on it, but everything comes at a cost and you do have to pay that cost at some point. I ended up stopping because the side effects were just too much for me. Why are all these other things happening if it's just supposed to give me a tan and nothing else? It's doing a lot more to people underneath the surface."
Dr Michael reckons he used it for around six months in total and estimates it took around the same amount of time for the side-effects of his Melanotan II use to wear off.
This all took place 20 years ago - but he is still dealing with the fallout of it to this day.
"When I started taking it, I noticed that freckles came out everywhere," Dr Michael said of the lasting impact of the peptide. "Still to this day, they haven’t gone."
According to the medic, Melanotan II 'does something really weird' to the moles and freckles on your skin - which make it pretty much impossible for doctors to determine if they are a melanoma or not.
"They don't look like a melanoma, but they don't look like normal moles," he explained. "They look like something kind of in between."
Dr Michael said another 'lasting legacy' of pumping his body with the peptide is a 'little square patch' of sun damage which emerges on his face each time he's in the sun, as he added: "It reminds me of Melanotan II."
But the thing that 'scared him' most was the bizarre consequence that his pursuit of achieving an impressive tan had on his eyes - and he reckons most people won't even have this on their radar.
"I had an eye check done just before I started taking Melanotan II," Dr Michael said. "Then about two years after I finished taking it, I went for another eye check and they showed me both pictures of the back of my eyes.
"There was a new freckle in the middle of my left eye, it was a decent size," he recalled, noting that the experts informed them it had 'changed quite quickly' in the time between his first and second visit.
'I was absolutely petrified'
He feared that he might have a melanoma of the eye - which 'are not related to sunlight or genetics', but are instead a result of pigment-producing cells in the eyes dividing and multiplying too rapidly.
This is exactly something that Melanotan II could 'trigger', Dr Michael explained. He was forced to return to the eye clinic every three months for an entire year to 'make sure that it wasn't changing'.
"Eventually it stabilised and it was just a mole that had gone through a bit of a growth spurt," he added. "But I was absolutely petrified."
He now has an annual check to make sure the freckle on his left eye hasn't developed any sinister characteristics - and wants to warn people that the consequences of Melanotan II aren't just skin-deep.
"People using this will not even know that, unless they're going to get their eyes checked," he added. "I won't be surprised in the future if I did get a little skin cancer.
"But I'm kind of at peace that I've done what I can since then to kind of reduce my risk. I want everybody online to know the full picture.
"It’s fun and games while you’re on it, but you can't be on it for forever. There's going to be a time where you have to come off of it and then that's when the issues really start for people."
Olivia Burke