Posts Tagged ‘obesity’

The progress we have witnessed in 25 years of working on obesity care has been nothing short of remarkable. Especially in the last four years with the introduction of advanced new obesity medicines. But let’s step back from the minutia of research, clinical care, and policy, to look at the big challenges that remain. When […]

For a long time, the relatively few people with deep commitment to obesity care knew that multimodal therapy was necessary. Bariatric surgery centers of excellence assembled teams to deliver nutrition, mental health, and physical therapy support. But persistence with follow-up was often disappointing. Now, though, something different is emerging. Suddenly, multimodal therapy is the hot […]

Last week, in a meeting with senior staff from the FDA responsible for labeling, we were dumbfounded. We learned that these pharmacologists did not regard it as important for clinicians to know the half-life of posaconazole in persons with obesity. In fact, they told us “it could potentially be confusing.” On the spot this was […]

Empathetic, respectful care sounds like a reasonable expectation for a primary care visit. New research, conducted by the Obesity Action Coalition, Drexel University, the ABOM Foundation, and Thoughtform, shows the way to take this from an aspiration to reality. Simply stated, persons living with obesity want more respect and less finger pointing in primary obesity […]

It’s entertaining in a perverse way. Cluelessness about the potential of orforglipron is impossible to miss in the news about Lilly’s new oral GLP-1 medicine for obesity this month. The company announced topline results from the first of two pivotal studies for this medicine on August 7 and investors decided the drug was a dud. […]

In the top ranks of the most watched shows on Netflix now is a documentary describing 18 seasons of exploitation on The Biggest Loser. For the folks who ran the original show, it generated hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars in revenue. For the folks who opened themselves up to exploitation on the […]

The evidence keeps building. Broadly, it is telling us that treating obesity is about much more than simply losing weight. It is about gaining health by managing the chronic disease of obesity and controlling it over time. Specifically this week, we have another piece of evidence to suggest that obesity treatment prevents cancer. In JAMA […]

There’s a long history on the tricky business of celebrity endorsements for weight management. Years ago, the benchmark was the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson, who became a spokesperson for Weight Watchers after her divorce from Prince Andrew. Proving much has changed in the popular conception of health and weight, the new benchmark is Serena […]

Increasingly, weight bias has gone underground. Explicit fat shaming has become socially unacceptable. But the human impulse behind it has not disappeared. So it pops up in diverse new ways. Like a school district that covers metabolic and bariatric surgery for employees, but requires a $5,000 copay that it refunds to employees only if they […]

We have a flourishing market for new obesity drugs. But that market has a problem. New drug developers are stumbling over what to target with their drugs. The old way of looking at goals for new drugs in this space was to aim for greater weight loss. More is better – right? In a new […]