Management of Obesity: Improvement of Training & Systems for Prevention & Care
2015
This series paper notes that obesity poses an enormous clinical burden and that innovative treatment and care-delivery strategies are needed. Although the caloric deficits achieved by increased awareness, policy, and environmental approaches have begun to achieve reductions in the prevalence of obesity in some countries, these approaches are insufficient to achieve weight loss in patients with severe obesity. In addition to biases and unfounded assumptions about patients with obesity, absence of training in behavior-change strategies and scarce experience working within interprofessional teams impairs care of patients with obesity.
New treatment strategies, such as the use of technology and innovative means of healthcare delivery that rely on health professionals other than physicians, represent promising options, particularly for patients with overweight and patients with mild to moderate obesity. The co-occurrence of undernutrition and obesity in low-income and middle-income countries poses unique challenges that might not be amenable to the same strategies as those that can be used in high-income countries.
This paper is a part of The Lancet Series: Obesity 2015, which explores how food environments can facilitate unhealthy eating, exploiting people’s biological, psychological, social, and economic vulnerabilities.
Management of Obesity: Improvement of Training & Systems for Prevention & Care
Source:
Dietz WH, Baur LA, Hall K et al. Management of Obesity: Improvement of Health-Care Training and Systems for Prevention and Care. The Lancet 2015; 385 (9986): 2521–2533. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(14)61748-7