MedWatch

MedWatch is the FDA's voluntary adverse event reporting program for serious problems associated with medications, medical devices, and dietary supplements. It lets healthcare professionals and patients report unexpected reactions, product quality problems, and medication errors directly to the FDA. For compounded peptides, MedWatch is the formal channel for flagging serious adverse events. Reports aggregate into FDA safety databases that inform future policy decisions — including PCAC reviews and FDA guidance on compounding. The voluntary nature matters: reporting is not mandatory for most non-regulated products, so adverse event data for research peptides is systematically incomplete. What appears in MedWatch represents a fraction of actual events, weighted toward serious reactions that prompted clinical contact. This is one of the structural reasons why the safety profile of research peptides is difficult to characterise accurately: the adverse event surveillance infrastructure that supports approved drugs (mandatory post-marketing studies, pharmacovigilance systems) largely doesn't apply to compounded peptides. MedWatch exists but it captures what gets reported, not what happens.