Posts Tagged ‘obesity care’

Promoting Stigma for Seeking Obesity Care

March 25, 2023 — New research in BMC Public Health raises important questions. Does news media frame obesity care for young persons in a way that promotes stigma? Does this reflect the bias of the media itself? Or does it play to the bias of the public that consumes this reporting? Thematic Analysis of Reporting from 2014 to 2022 […]

Do Obesity Meds Threaten Body Acceptance?

March 21, 2023 — For years, many health experts have been raising alarms about the rising prevalence of obesity. It’s an epidemic – no, a pandemic. In the absence of a good solution, though, most people move on to worrying about problems they can solve. So the idea of body positivity and acceptance has gained traction. “Diet culture” became […]

Absurd Arguments About Cost of Obesity Care

March 14, 2023 — Recently, we have written much about the high cost of obesity medicines, limited coverage under health plans, and the need for change. This is a very real problem and glaciers melt faster (sad to say) than policy makers make progress on this. But absurd arguments about the cost of obesity care do not help. In […]

Defining Obesity, Fooled by Appearances

March 5, 2023 — Defining obesity is a tricky enterprise for the simple reason that we are all easily fooled by appearances. But obesity is not a disease of size or appearance. It’s a disease of dysregulated adipose tissue. This fact doesn’t stop people from thinking – falsely – that they can size up a person’s metabolic health based […]

OCW2023: The Fear of Delivering Obesity Care

February 28, 2023 — To be sure, fear of change is understandable. The number of people living with obesity and suffering its complications has grown large. Achieving a balance between treating a problem like obesity and preventing it is tricky. To make it worse, we are living in a time when the media has figured out that fear and […]

OCW2023: Defining Basic, Decent Obesity Care

February 24, 2023 — Obesity Care Week has come as we are in the midst of a great public re-thinking of obesity care. Feelings about this subject are strong, but facts are catching up with those feelings and causing people to reconsider old ways of thinking. The dialogue goes in many directions, but a key issue is access to […]

Climbing the Learning Curve in Obesity Medicine

February 1, 2023 — After years of having not much to offer people suffering from the health effects of obesity, healthcare providers find themselves climbing a learning curve in obesity medicine. The pressure is here because the options for medical care of obesity have leapt forward recently. Minimally invasive bariatric surgery can offer dramatic improvements in health. Advanced medicines […]

Can Obesity Care Overcome Fixation on BMI?

January 5, 2023 — One of the easy predictions to make for 2023 is that it will be a year of hot debates about obesity. We have plenty of hot topics to choose from, but one of the hottest is what to do with BMI. It is firmly planted in the landscape of discussions about obesity because it can […]

60 Minutes: Obesity Care in a Broken Health System

January 2, 2023 — On 60 Minutes last night, Lesley Stahl reported in vivid detail just how hard it is to get good obesity care in our broken system for healthcare. She had help. Two of the world’s top obesity medicine physicians – Fatima Cody Stanford and Caroline Apovian – took viewers into their clinics. Two of Apovian’s patients […]

Five Trends to Define 2023 in Obesity and Health

January 1, 2023 — While some of us slept last night, the calendar rolled us into the start of a whole new year. A clean slate with new challenges and opportunities. So what lies ahead? It’s impossible to know (as our review of 2022 predictions nicely shows), but that won’t stop us from offering our best guess. In that […]