I had the chance to attend Obesity Week 2019 in Las Vegas from November 3-7. Obesity is not really a topic or area that I had much exposure to during training. But in the past few years I have wished that I knew more about it. After residency I worked exclusively in the inpatient setting as a hospitalist. For those of you unfamiliar with this term, it means that I only worked in the hospital treating patients who were sick enough to be admitted in the hospital. During this time I would frequently encounter patients with chronic medical conditions, many of which would improve with significant weight loss. But the extent of my intervention was to advise the patient about the importance of lifestyle changes and to follow up with their primary care physician. Because for the hospitalist, the physician-patient relationship ends when the patient is discharged from the hospital.
A few years ago I asked around our division why our outpatient Internal Medicine clinics did not have an obesity clinic. After all, I thought, this should be well within the scope of practice for an internist. This is not to say that no one at my institution was treating obesity. In fact, we had a medical weight loss program as well as a bariatric surgery program. But Internal Medicine did not have a dedicated clinic for obesity. Instead, internists had to address obesity along with any other medical conditions during a patient visit.
Fortunately, while I was asking around and looking into obesity treatment, I discovered that one could become board certified in obesity medicine by the American Board of Obesity Medicine. And, through asking around, I learned about the annual Obesity Week meetings held by The Obesity Society (TOS) and the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery (ASMBS).
Over the last year I have transitioned out of inpatient medicine. Currently I see patients in the Internal Medicine clinic at my institution as a primary care physician. But I am also starting a new learning/educational journey with the obesity medicine. I am not sure where this journey will take me. But as with the journey thus far, I’ll continue to try and write and reflect on it here.
