March 10, 2025 — Seemingly limitless demand for obesity meds, botox, and lip fillers is driving robust growth for med spas in the U.S. The medical spa industry reports expansion from 1,600 locations in 2010 to more than 10,000 in 2023. The revenue for an average spa more than doubled to $1.4 million per spa. In 2023, that added […]
February 18, 2025 — Two new papers offer a sharp focus on a stark gap at the intersection of healthcare and obesity – a dearth of empathy. Stuart Flint and colleagues explain the importance of understanding lived experiences with obesity for closing that gap: “The lived experience of obesity is clearly much more complex than the typical societal narrative, […]
February 8, 2025 — A telehealth business has a slick, defiant commercial for their compounded weight loss medication ready to run during the Super Bowl tomorrow. More than a few doctors are definitely not amused. They are not the only ones. Two senators have written to the acting head of the FDA to say that caution and fair balance […]
December 17, 2024 — One of the harms that weight stigma causes is the avoidance of medical care. But an unexpected side effect of GLP-1 therapy in persons with overweight or obesity may be increased engagement with healthcare. This insight comes from a new analysis of electronic health records for 711,783 persons. As the use of these medicines for […]
October 14, 2024 — Are we on the way to ending weight stigma or is it more stubbornly persistent than we might imagine? We found a clue to the persistence of bias in health professionals in a new commentary published by the Washington Post. From his perch at the Harvard Medical School, Dr. Preston Lee writes: “Like many doctors, […]
July 3, 2024 — Nope, says Dr. Alissa Chen. Medicare shouldn’t start covering obesity medicines. Her dad, 72, has obesity that began when he was in grad school and has persisted throughout his life. Now he has the cardiovascular disease that often results from untreated obesity. But no, she doesn’t want him to receive treatment with advanced medicines proven […]
June 10, 2024 — For some time, one of the tenets of the fat acceptance movement has been that the health harms of obesity have been grossly exaggerated. Rather, it is the psychological stress of fat phobia that explains the poor health outcomes associated with obesity. In selling her fat acceptance book, philosopher Kate Manne insists obesity itself is […]
June 5, 2024 — Big change sometimes happens very quietly. For example, on April 5, the AP Stylebook added a new entry on “obesity, obese, overweight.” It goes into a great deal of detail about language for writing about obesity. But here is the heart of the matter, in the words of the Associated Press stylebook editors: “The phrasing […]
April 29, 2024 — What does it take to change the explicit and implicit bias that people have about others and themselves based solely upon body weight or fatness? New research tells us that we should pay attention to cognitive dissonance. In other words, we should be asking, does our weight bias reflect our beliefs? Or is there a […]
April 28, 2024 — Daniella Lamas is a critical care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She recalls telling the wife of a patient who was dying something she did not want to hear about her husband’s care. The woman told Lamas: “Why should I believe you? I don’t think that I do.” The Imperative for Trust […]
