September 17, 2015 – Docs and Weight Loss

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Anchor lead: Your primary care doc may be pivotal to weight loss efforts, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Obesity is a complex problem, with a host of factors that impact on how to support someone in losing weight and keeping it off.  Now research by Wendy Bennett, an internal medicine expert at Johns Hopkins, and colleagues, points to one’s relationship with his or her primary care physician as key to helping them stick with a weight loss program.

Bennett: We wanted to understand how important the patient-provider relationship was. And so that includes things like patient-provider communication, trust, how well you feel your provider knows you, and we wanted to know whether the patient-provider relationship was associated with how successful patients were with losing weight. Patients who highly rated their providers in terms of happy they were  that they involved with the study, or happy they were that they were reviewing those weight loss progress reports, they were more likely to lose weight.   :32

Bennett says physicians didn’t counsel patients but did support them and cheer them on.  At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.