Access: Addressing the Obesity Crisis

By: Dr. Amy Lee, Douglas Ramsthel CFP(R), and Jessica Carpenter RDN MBA

As a trained physician, seeing the many types of patients in Dr. Amy Lee's years of practice, she has come to realize that what she does in treating a patient with obesity is a not straightforward. There is not one type of diet regimen for everyone, just as if there is not one pill that fixes all problems.

She finds herself working backwards by first, meeting someone with the condition of overweightness, followed by digging into their history on the root cause of the outcome. What needs to be recognized is the many causes, which could be genetic predisposition, environmental forces, complications from mental health, or simply taking a medication with adverse reactions of weight gain. In order for practitioners like Dr. Lee to carry out this job, they need the medical community as well as the ancillary services to recognize the complexity of what it takes to fully make an impact in this patient population. If they do not make changes and move forward, this epidemic of obesity will surely become the next pandemic. Dr. Lee's hope in publishing Access: Addressing the Obesity Crisis is to share with her colleagues the "other side" of the practice often overlooked or under-recognized. This is an attempt to shed a little light to what they are doing as medical bariatricians and the impact they can make for their patients.