Personalized Patient Care for the Treatment of Obesity
In This Video
- The Weight Center at Massachusetts General Hospital provides comprehensive, multidisciplinary treatment for the disease of obesity
- Angela Fitch, MD, is the associate director of the Mass General Weight Center
- Alongside her team, she works to explore the largely misunderstood disease of obesity and the personalized care she and her team provide
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Angela Fitch, MD, is the associate director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Weight Center. In this video, she explores the nuances of the largely misunderstood disease of obesity and the personalized care she and her team provide at the Weight Center.
Transcript
As the associate director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Weight Center, I'm very excited about working together as a team and really optimizing our team-based care to develop the best outcome for each person.
We know that everybody is an individual at the Weight Center, and [we try] to figure out what works best for each patient. [Determining] whether that's genetic or whether that's a phenotypical expression of the disease is really going to be the next level of treatment for obesity—and we're excited to be at the forefront of that and really working hard to optimize care for patients with this disease.
Obesity is a complex condition that requires both medication, behavioral and lifestyle management, as well as surgery to treat it effectively. We're looking at ways of optimizing care for patients to develop the best outcome for each patient individually because we know this is a personal disease and a disease that requires intensive treatment to make it better.
There's more than one type of obesity. We talk about obesity as a disease, but really there are multiple types of obesity, just like there are multiple types of cancers. We don't treat all cancer the same, and we probably shouldn't treat all obesity the same—yet today there's very much a feeling out in the community that it's exercise more and eat less, and we know that that's not the case. We know that we need medications to help patients with their hunger and with their appetite control and to help really devise the most optimal outcome is really what's going to be the future of medicine in obesity treatment.
At the Mass General Weight Center, we're very hopeful that a lot of the newer medications that are coming to market have shown some great promise in helping patients, both before and after surgery, or when surgery is not their choice of care, and we have the ability to offer the full service of care. We see adults, we see pediatric patients and we also care for the full spectrum from those patients that need surgical intervention to those patients that have medical intervention.
Combinations of medications combined with surgical interventions and other endoscopic and nonsurgical tools can really help patients to get the best treatment possible. Practicing medicine and doing research here at Mass General is truly amazing. Being around so many smart people and so much technology truly move the field forward and is very exciting for the future of obesity treatment in particular.
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