October 13, 2018 — My struggle with weight began in my early teens. That was when my doctor prescribed a birth control medicine to treat dysmenorrhea. But I didn’t know it would cause massive weight gain and hormone fluctuations. I’ve had to work at overcoming obesity every day of my life since then. One of the hardest things about […]
October 12, 2018 — There’s no gentle way to express this. We suffer from a huge ethical blind spot regarding access to obesity care. Today, as National Obesity Care Week focuses upon access to care, we must acknowledge just how big this gap is. Of course, we focus a lot on the issue of access to obesity treatment. We […]
October 10, 2018 — In 2017, about 1.4 million Americans left the U.S. to obtain medical care. And that number will grow by double digits this year. The reasons are many, but mostly it comes down to money. And a significant number of people are traveling for bariatric surgery. A Shameful History of Discrimination Health plans have long history […]
October 9, 2018 — Tuesday is obesity medicine day for National Obesity Care Week. And it just so happens that we have two new studies on the subject in the Lancet. They point to a trend. Day by day, we see evidence of more options and better outcomes for medical obesity care. A New Dual-Receptor Agonist Juan Frias and […]
October 8, 2018 — Diet is a four letter word. People who hate the word like to point out that it starts with die. So it is that more or less everyone agrees dieting does not work for the long term. But this is where the confusion starts. Because sustainable changes to long-term patterns of diet can make a […]
October 7, 2018 — Just a few years ago, the debate was still going strong. “This is not a disease. People have the capacity to take control of their lives. It’s a disorder of choice.” Sound familiar? In 2010, Harvard’s Gene Heyman made these arguments against dealing with addiction as a disease in a popular book from the Harvard […]
October 6, 2018 — The eternal debate grinds on. What determines our destiny more? Nature or nurture? And where does that leave the important matter of free will? When the subject is obesity, this debate is especially contentious. The most common – but incorrect – understanding of obesity holds that it is a failure of willpower. Nature and nurture take a […]
September 30, 2018 — If you want to understand where the future lies in obesity medicine, Aaron Kelly suggests you look closely at precision medicine. At the fall summit of the Obesity Medicine Association yesterday, Kelly offered a tantalizing overview of this approach. But for now, he cautioned, clinicians have to fall back on a more pragmatic approach. In […]
September 29, 2018 — The language of obesity is a tricky business. Nobody likes being called obese. But it doesn’t stop there. Common wisdom tells clinicians to be very careful about the O-word in any form. Obesity clinics don’t tend to have long lines of patients waiting at the door. Weight management clinics attract more clients. However, new research […]
September 28, 2018 — At the Obesity Medicine Association (OMA) meeting in Washington, DC, it’s becoming visible. Medical and surgical obesity care have sometimes existed in completely separate spheres. But these two distinct spheres are growing closer together. For the sake of better patient care, we see a trend toward integrating medical and surgical obesity care. We can see […]
