Weight training:
Doctors find new ways to treat overweight patients

By Lauralee Ortiz
(Public Access Journalism)

The woman lets out a nervous chuckle, hoping a punch line is about to follow to ease the shame intensifying inside her. But the doctor says nothing more, and she is too humiliated to bring it up again.

Within a year, the woman finds a new doctor — a nutrition specialist who deals sensitively but directly with her obesity — and drops more than 75 pounds.

“The doctor shook her up, but in the wrong way,” said her new doctor, researcher Pamela Peeke. “He ended up losing her as a patient.”

It’s a scene that plays out daily in doctors’ offices across the United States. Uncomfortable with their patients’ weight issues, physicians either attempt to make light of the condition or ignore it altogether.

It’s not intentional, say medical experts, who instead point fingers at medical schools, most of which lack curricula to teach budding physicians how to approach and handle this sensitive issue.

But with America in the midst of an obesity epidemic linked to an increase in heart disease, high blood pressure, dangerous cholesterol levels, cancer and diabetes, medical schools may finally be waking up to smell the coffee — no sugar, no cream.

The latest statistics from the National Institutes of Health show that 61 percent of U.S. adults are overweight, with body fat at 25 percent or higher, and one-third, at 30 percent body mass or higher, are obese — putting them at increased risk of death.  Without medical intervention, “Their next meal could be their last,” said Dr. Jim Early, director of prevention at University of Kansas School of Medicine in Wichita.

Doctors themselves say they need more advice — in the form of training in nutrition and the links between diets and obesity. A 1999 study by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Maternal and Child Health Bureau reported that pediatricians, especially, are at a loss when dealing with unmotivated, hypersensitive, overweight kids and uninvolved parents.

“I was never taught about nutrition in medical school,” said Dr. Nikhil Dhurandhar of Detroit. “I think their thought was, ‘You’re a fatso, so stop eating and you’ll be OK.’ It’s considered a moral character flaw.”

Seeing his father, also a physician, struggle with weight problems triggered strong emotions in Dhurandhar about the stigmas attached to obesity, and spurred him to earn his master’s degree in nutrition. He now works in obesity research at Wayne State University.

Dr. Kim Yee, of Loma Linda University Children’s Hospital in California, said she too had to pursue nutrition training on her own when she found it wasn’t offered in all her years of medical school.

“We didn’t do a lot with nutrition in residency,” she said. “We just accepted that it wasn’t part of the training.”

Three years out of medical school, Yee now works with obese children. She said she meets with some resistance, particularly from her patients’ parents — many of whom also are overweight.

“We try to get them (parents) to participate by exercising with their kids and following similar diets,” she said, “but they aren’t interested.”

For other doctors, the frustration lies with adult patients who refuse to acknowledge, let alone deal with, their weight problems.

“People get very defensive about their weight,” said Patricia Loofbourrow, a former family physician who now offers medical advice online on “Doc Trish Explains It All.” “That makes it hard to help them.”

When she was a practicing physician in San Bernardino, Calif., Loofbourrow said she felt an obligation to advise obese patients when their weight directly affected their health, even at the risk of offending them — “Which is worse?” she reasoned. But because her medical background lacked specific nutrition training, most of her advice was general.

“Doctors can handle general questions for patients with bad back or heart problems, wanting to know if they can start a particular exercise program,” she said, but once weight issues come into the examining room, doctors often lack the background in nutrition to offer specific help.

“The bottom line is that nutrition was never respected as a bona fide science,” said Peeke, who researched nutrition issues for the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. “It was blown off to a registered dietitian. It hasn’t received the true credence that it deserves.”

Dr. David Heber, professor of medicine and director of the Nutrition/Obesity Training Program at the University of California at Los Angeles, agreed.

“We have done a good job teaching (students) about drugs and surgery,” he said, “But nutrition is still an elective.”

The good news is that many hospital staffs, medical school administrators and physicians in private practice are stepping up to the plate. Some are doing it by creating programs that serve their own patients’ needs, while others are opening up the field of nutrition to medical students and physicians.

Peeke, for example, is teaching and developing new medical curricula in nutrition at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, where she serves as an assistant clinical professor. Her class addresses everything from good eating habits and fad diets to metabolism and steak-and-potatoes versus vegetables — anything she thinks will make her medical students more effective doctors.

In private practice, Peeke uses an unconventional approach. For starters, patients know to bring their “sneaks” for appointments “because I like to multitask — walk and talk at the same time,” she said.

In 2001, she and 12 of her female patients dubbed themselves “Peeke Performers,” trained for six months, then ran in the New York City Marathon. Later this summer, Peeke and some of those same women will hike up New Hampshire’s Mt. Whitney.

Dr. Michael Dangovian, medical director of cardiac rehabilitation and wellness at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich., uses a totally different approach — yoga.

“What works for me and my patients is developing more awareness on different levels,” Dangovian said. He runs free yoga classes weekly for his cardiac patients, whose health problems often are linked to obesity.

Dangovian’s inspiration came after reading “objective evidence” showing exercise and mindful meditation can reverse heart disease. The problem with obesity, Dangovian said, is that people eat too much, not always because they are hungry.

“We are satisfying — or suppressing — a lot of different needs,” he said. “By working with yoga, meditation and imagery, we can look deeper to what causes that urge.”

At the University of Kansas Medical School, the push is for sharing the wealth, with a public health class for senior students. The future doctors are being taught to keep data on their patients’ successes and challenges to find patterns to help the community benefit as a whole, according to Early. If all diabetic patients were doing well under one doctor’s care, for example, that doctor would share her methods with others.

Early said medical staffs at both the University of Kansas and Kansas State University recently combined efforts to develop weight management programs for families, taking into consideration cultural differences that impact eating and exercise habits.

In 1998, obesity experts from eight medical centers collaborated to create the Centers for Obesity Research and Education to train established health care professionals about all the options available to treat obesity, including better nutrition, exercise, drugs and, in extreme cases, surgery. In one workshop, doctors actually wear weighted, oversized “empathy” suits to experience life weighed down by extra pounds.

Six years ago, a group of physicians was so motivated by the alarming childhood obesity numbers that they volunteered to start “Growing Fit,” an intense, 12-week program at Loma Linda University Children’s Hospital now funded by grants. The children in the program get group and individual counseling to deal with self-esteem issues, along with class instruction on proper nutrition. The “total approach” philosophy also includes examining family history and encouraging family support.

“We have children coming in with thoughts of not wanting to live,” said program director Dr. Kiti Freier. “We need to catch these kinds of things before it’s too late.”

America on the Move is the newest program from Dr. James Hill, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado and regional vice president of the International Association for the Study of Obesity. Patterned after an earlier successful effort, Colorado on the Move, its goal is to help people get active without drastically altering their lifestyles.

“It’s based on making small changes in physical activity — walking 2,000 extra steps each day, and eating 100 calories less each day,” Hill said. “It is a fun, simple program that we think can be a grass-roots movement to begin addressing obesity.”

At Wayne State University, Dhurandhar is taking a more controversial approach — researching his discovery of AD-36, the first human virus linked to some types of obesity. His goal is to find the mechanism that causes fat cells to react and then come up with a vaccine to treat and prevent it.

“This is not to say that all obesity is due to viral infection,” he said, listing other factors such as medical problems, metabolism and personal eating habits. Still, Dhurandhar said, the concept intrigues him, despite skepticism from colleagues.

“When I was growing up, I was around obese people all of the time,” he said in explaining his motivation to pursue not only his research, but his focus on obese patients. “Some of the things I saw and heard made me feel very sad.”

If only one in five doctors pursued similar specializations, “we’d have itmade,” said the University of California’s Heber. “We’re better off than we were 20 years ago and we’re getting there.”

Early said he knows that overweight and obese Americans can turn their health around with the right support and motivation. He found that out firsthand.

“I’m 56 years old and a prostate cancer survivor,” the physician said. “I once weighed over 200 pounds and had cholesterol level well over 400. My cousins and many of my immediate family are gone from premature heart disease.”

His new, healthy lifestyle includes self-prescribed daily exercise, running 15 to 20 miles a week and a diet of least five fruits and vegetables a day.

“There’s a whole nation of people who haven’t had heart attacks yet,” he said. “There’s plenty of time to ... reverse the damage.”
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Lauralee Ortiz writes about medical and fitness issues for the Detroit Free Press.
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(c) 2003, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.