weight loss and physicians

I had a long discussion yesterday with a family practice physician who will be bringing the Serotonin-Plus Weight Loss Program to her practice in Boyton Beach Florida. She has many friends throughout the state of Florida who have their own family practices, and she was telling me that none of them have an interventional program for weight loss. She is a young family physician and her residency program was less than 2 years ago.

I trained in internal medicine almost 20 years ago and we received ZERO teaching about nutrition/psychological aspects of weight problems/how to help people lose weight. We were trained how to manage disease states...not how to prevent them. To hear that years later, the similar concepts occur in training programs amazed and disturbed me. To this day, physicians are receiving little to no training on how to help people lose weight. As mentioned ad nauseum in this blog, weight problems lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths yearly in the United States. How is it possible that there EVERY primary care physician does NOT receive formal training on helping people lose weight?

The growing epidemic of obesity is killing Americans prematurely, and I most certainly hope that medical schools and residency programs start focusing on the most important health problem facing America.