March 25, 2024 — Weight neutral approaches to health and healthcare are the subject of well-deserved attention. The World Obesity Federation recently published a position statement on recognizing and reducing weight stigma. One of nine recommendations was to “engage in weight-neutral health promotion.” But what does this really mean? How should a healthcare provider respond to a patient’s concern […]
February 26, 2024 — We are in the midst of a great leap forward in pediatric obesity – from knowing to doing what we should in caring for the young persons with this chronic disease. ATPO 2024 at the University of Minnesota Center for Pediatric Obesity Medicine (CPOM) last week made this clear. We know much more about how […]
November 8, 2023 — Public health experts have long been accounting for it. People are living in larger bodies. Better than 40% of U.S. adults have a body weight in the range of obesity. But new reporting from JoNel Aleccia for the Associated Press tells us that pharma and the FDA are not yet accounting for this fact. It’s […]
August 18, 2023 — We are clearly on a path toward better obesity medicines, but reflecting on decades of work on this, clearly, the path is twisted. Describing this path, Gina Kolata writes: “Every so often a drug comes along that has the potential to change the world. Medical specialists say the latest to offer that possibility are the […]
June 14, 2023 — Recent advances in the scientific understanding of obesity has led to more frequent public rejection of explicit weight bias, but implicit bias and stigma remains a serious impediment to health. Language is a potent tool that frames our understanding of obesity. But too often, even in scientific publications, it reflects bias against people with obesity […]
May 17, 2023 — The current sensation around advanced medicines for obesity all too often focuses on a single outcome – weight loss. On the opening day of ECO2023, a symposium by the SQOT project reminds us that outcomes other than weight loss can matter to patients quite a lot. In reality, the reason that many people seek obesity […]
May 5, 2023 — Yesterday at the AACE 2023 annual meeting and in Endocrine Practice, this society of clinical endocrinologists unveiled a new consensus statement on obesity. The core message is unmistakable: endocrinologists should prioritize reducing the harm of stigma in obesity care. Karl Nadolsky, lead author, presented this new consensus at the meeting and tells ConscienHealth: “This is […]
April 25, 2023 — Right now, it’s getting much easier to find medical help with weight loss, but finding real obesity care remains more challenging. In fact, a new paper by Lauren Oshman and colleagues tells us that less than ten percent of primary care providers (PCPs) in a sample from an academic health system actually use evidence-based guidelines […]
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 […]
December 14, 2022 — Decades have passed with medical experts talking about an “obesity epidemic.” Meanwhile the prevalence of this condition rose without a pause. A new study in Family Practice offers some insight into how this plays out in primary care. Madeleine Tremblett, Annabel Poon, Paul Aveyard, and Charlotte Albury analyzed 159 recordings of advice from GPs to […]
