Posts Tagged ‘innovation’

We face a pivot point for public health strategies to prevent obesity. The advent of advanced medicines for obesity treatment brings critical questions. Can we find better strategies for preventing obesity at the entrance to causal pathways for it? Or will we instead depend solely on medical interventions to reduce the harm it causes? These […]

More than a decade of life as a champion for obesity care has been an enlightening road to travel. Obesity Care Week 2023 is a great occasion for looking forward because there can be no doubt. As Axios recently explained, the healthcare system is in the midst of a great re-think of obesity: “Doctors and […]

Public discourse about new medicines for treating obesity is easy to find right now – and a lot of it seems unreal from our vantage point. Headlines about people “terrified” by the prospect of effective options for kids with severe obesity or debating which Hollywood stars might be taking one of these drugs are weirdly off-topic. […]

Sixty years ago, President John F. Kennedy warned the graduating class at Yale that too often “We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” Public discourse on the subject of obesity right now is certainly bringing that thought into vivid view. Over and over again, we hear supposed experts expressing their comfortable […]

“I can’t afford to spend any more time here [in the hospital]. I don’t have the money.” These are the words of a victim in the mass shooting at Half Moon Bay, California, last month. It points to an uncomfortable truth. Increasingly, medical care is becoming a luxury. Helaine Olen describes it for the Washington […]

There’s an ugly accident at the intersection of U.S. drug prices, health insurance, and obesity. In a report yesterday, NPR reporter Allison Aubrey described how people living with obesity, after finding at long last that they have an option to get their medical condition under control, learn that they’re at the mercy of excessive drug […]

We are living in a pivotal moment for the public understanding of a common and complex chronic disease. It is a moment when two competing, but very different, lies about obesity are falling apart. Simply Bad Choices On one hand, the big lie about obesity for decades has been that it is a simple matter […]

This is indisputably good news. But the arrival of the first ever pediatric obesity treatment guideline is also most certainly unsettling. It’s good news because the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is finally saying that it’s not OK to sit back and watch kids for whom obesity is causing great harm to their health and […]

More than a few writers have been worrying lately about a new artificial intelligence app, ChatGPT. In the Guardian, Alex Hern supposed that it will put professors and journalists out of their jobs. So we wondered. Could this implementation of AI demonstrate an understanding of obesity? The obvious answer was to give it a try. […]

We’re zooming toward the end of 2022, so it’s hard to resist looking back to see which of the posts on ConscienHealth you read the most. We are grateful for the smart and diverse people who take the time to read what we post here. Seeing what captures your attention teaches us a thing or […]