December 31, 2013 — Our top 10 most read obesity and nutrition stories in 2013 have two things in common. Many of them deal with distinction between evidence-based findings and suppositions presented as facts. And many of them provide a concise distillation of observations. Here are the stories that more people read than any others on ConscienHealth in 2013. Hot […]
December 20, 2013 — FDA is trying to look at medical obesity devices through a patient’s eyes as they work with the medical device industry and payers to foster innovative medical technology for the treatment of obesity. At a two-day meeting jointly sponsored by the FDA and the American Gastroenterological Association, Telba Irony presented research conducted by FDA into […]
November 7, 2013 — The first ever Obesity Week meeting opens on Monday in Atlanta and runs for the entire week at the Georgia World Congress Center. With both the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery and the Obesity Society meeting at once, you’ll need to plan very carefully if you’re going to be sure you don’t miss […]
October 24, 2013 — Obesity surgery, diet, and exercise are often set up in subtle and misleading opposition. An excellent new study in the British Medical Journal finds that surgical treatment of obesity leads to greater weight loss and remission of diabetes than non-surgical treatment. But the headlines go like this: “Surgery trounces diet and exercise for treating obesity […]
September 26, 2013 — Seven years after imposing obesity surgery quality standards for Medicare, CMS (the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) has decided to drop them entirely. Folks with their own (competing) standards had lobbied CMS to decide that the current standards weren’t working well enough and that they reduced access to care for some patients. To the […]
August 21, 2013 — A number of recent studies describe substantial racial disparities in accessing surgical treatment for obesity. Significant racial disparities in the health burden of obesity have been known for some time. So understanding disparate access to treatment is essential to understanding the larger picture. The American Journal of Gastroenterology just published a study of inpatient bariatric surgery […]
August 12, 2013 — The proposal to eliminate obesity surgery standards by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will put the safety of vulnerable patients at risk, according to a coalition of the major professional and patient groups advocating for people with obesity. At present, only facilities certified as centers of excellence can be paid for obesity […]
May 30, 2013 — New data published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences adds yet more evidence that obesity treatment and prevention go hand in hand. A team of researchers at Laval University showed that genes associated with obesity are suppressed in children born to a mother after she had obesity surgery. The result: […]
May 29, 2013 — Some health officials are so busy paying for obesity — in the form of diseases it causes — that they have no money to pay for treating obesity. Here’s how one put it in a recent interview on National Public Radio: Most of the discussion in our state is how do we provide the kind […]
