FREE ESSAY ON OBESITY

OBESITY

Excess weight is major medical problem for more than one third of Americans and after
cigarette smoking, is the second largest cause of death. However, obesity treatments
remain controversial, and only surgical therapies have patient volume and appropriate
follow-up adequate to prove effectiveness. 
Today's challenge in health care is to prevent or diagnose, treat, and manage acute or
chronic diseases that affect many people while controlling cost, maintaining standards of
care, and improving quality of life. Obesity is one such treatable disease because of its
association with physical, psychosocial, and disability costs that affect quality of
life. For the severely obese, it is a chronic, heterogeneous, multisystemic disese that
has many equivocal causes and consequences. 
Recent findings show the importance of genetic factors as a major influence in the
etiology and refractory nature of obesity. Aggressive, medically supervised
interventions, such as very-low-calorie diets (VLCDs) and pharmacologic and surgical
treatments, are especially needed for genetically susceptible individuals who do not
respond to low-risk dieting and behavioral modification treatments or cannot maintain a
healthy body weight despite multiple attempts to lose weight. A model is neede to
incorporate these obesity treatment guidelines into an everyday clinical physician
practice.