An article In the December 2012 issue of the British Medical Journal reports that 56% of MDs felt they could not help obese people lose weight. They felt that measuring the body mass index (BMI) and putting people on low calorie diets would be a major step forward. For the time being they felt that dieticians and nutritionists would be better at helping these people.
Hogwash! This is a naive approach to understanding why people are overweight. We all know when we're overweight, we don't need a fancy scale that measure our BMI or another diet that doesn't work.
We need to use our skills as doctors to search for the underlying problems that led to becoming obese if we're going to have any chance of solving the problem. Factors such as hypothyroidism, insulin and leptin resistance, inflammation, insomnia, toxic exposures, use of many medications such asa SSRIs, anti-psychotics, beta blockers, anti-seizure medications, PTSD, bulimia, and much more need to be considered.
