New Tools Take Whole-person Approach to Obesity Care

It’s a staggering problem that may seem overwhelming to primary care physicians, but Keisha Harvey Mansfield, M.D., FAAFP, DABOM, said family physicians can play an important role in addressing the crisis.

“We now realize that so many diseases are linked to obesity,” said Harvey Mansfield, who focused the work of her AAFP Health Equity Fellowship on treating obesity in rural practice in 2020 and is continuing that work while pursuing a master’s of health professions degree. “One of the reasons we went into this specialty is because we wanted to treat the whole person. If you want to help a patient get off medications for high blood pressure, diabetes, osteoarthritis or sleep apnea, one disease you can treat to improve that person’s quality of life is obesity. This is an exciting time with all the new medications that are coming down the pipeline. We need to give physicians more information and education on best practices for things like nutrition counseling and exercise.”

The AAFP is doing just that with a comprehensive collection of new resources:

• A free practice manual regarding obesity covers everything from diagnosis to lifestyle interventions, medication, surgery, the patient-physicians relationship, cultural sensitivity, barriers to care and collaborative care.

• An online CME package, which is free to AAFP members, offers 11 sessions covering issues including nutrition, charting, documentation, billing, telemedicine and procedures. The course is worth 11.25 CME credits, and two additional credits are available for participants who complete a Translation to Practice process. A related session focused on anti-obesity medications will be offered Sept. 27 during the Family Medicine Experience in Phoenix.

• Another online CME package is worth 11.75 AAFP Prescribed Credits and offers more than a dozen sessions with topics including binge eating, childhood obesity, obesity treatment and management, nutrition, weight loss and navigating barriers to treatment. That package is available to AAFP members for $325 ($275 for new physicians) and is accessible through February 2026.

• The Academy partnered with the American Diabetes Association to produce a seven-part podcast, “A Focus on Obesity.” The series, co-hosted by family physician Neil Skolnik, M.D., is available for free on multiple platforms and offers episodes for physicians as well as others geared to patients with diabetes and their caregivers.  

• Physicians can earn up to 0.5 CME credits per episode by listening to the CME on the Go series on the Inside Family Medicine podcast. Family physicians Lauren Brown-Berchtold, M.D., FAAFP; Jason Marker, M.D., M.P.A., FAAFP; and Tamaan Osborne-Roberts, M.D., M.B.A., FAAFP, discuss weight-loss medications in the July 18 episode.

• Finally, numerous free resources are available to patients on familydoctor.org regarding exercise, nutrition, obesity and weight loss.

Harvey Mansfield, a small practice owner in Washington Parish, La., is faculty for the paid CME package, presenting sessions on diseases related to obesity, treatment and weight bias. She also is a co-author of the practice manual.

She said the Academy’s obesity resources complement each other.

“Even if you watch the CME videos, still read the obesity manual because it is a gem,” she said. “It’s definitely practice changing, but they’re changes that are easy to adopt. We’re not asking physicians to get new machinery or run a bunch of new tests. It’s about opening the conversation so that patients can be more enlightened about the options available to them. Very few physicians are partnering patients with the resources, medications and referrals that are needed for the disease of obesity. Even though we’ve made leaps and bounds, we still have a long way to go.”

The World Health Organization declared obesity an epidemic in 1997, and the AMA declared it a complex, chronic disease that requires medical attention in 2013. But more than a decade later after that shift, the trends remain alarming.

“I think the biggest issue is that we considered obesity a lifestyle disease for a long time,” Harvey Mansfield said. “Now we have more resources and more education, and we know that it’s a neurobehavioral disease. There also was a stigma in the realm of obesity treatment. Now we have powerful drugs, and I think we can better explain to people why they may only eat one time a day and still battle with the disease of obesity.”

Those newer drugs are of great interest to Carolynn Francavilla Brown, M.D., FOMA, owner of a four-physician family medicine practice in Lakewood, Colo., with a focus on obesity medicine.

Francavilla Brown will present two Sept. 27 sessions at FMX that will cover prescribing glucagon-like peptide-1 agonists, nutrition, exercise and alternative medications. The one-hour courses will be followed by one-hour practice-based learning sessions that will help attendees apply what they learned to a plan for implementing practice changes that will improve care.

“Traditionally, physicians have not really gotten behind using medications for obesity, even though we have had medications available for 65 years,” said Francavilla Brown, an associate clinical professor at Rocky Vista University and host of the Dr. Francavilla Show podcast, which is focused on weight and health. “Most physicians are very much aware of the new injectable medications. They’re incredibly popular, and they are more effective than our older medications. However, there are a lot of challenges with the new medications, predominantly cost and insurance coverage. This is an opportunity to explore the new medications and how to best use those, but it’s also going to be a reminder that they’re not our only options and kind of take people back to some of other options they may not have considered.”

Francavilla Brown, who is one of the faculty members for the free online CME course, said her FMX talk also will cover the pros and cons of different medications.

“I’m going to give you as much information as possible about prescribing all anti-obesity medications in the two hours we have together,” said Francavilla Brown, who serves on the Obesity Medicine Association Board of Trustees. “The other big thing that will be covered is how to optimize those medications, not just managing side effects, but also the best sort of nutrition and exercise advice to complement the medication.”

Physicians also can join a dialogue on evidence-based approaches, best practices and improving patient outcomes related to obesity management at noon CT July 24 in a chat on X (formerly Twitter). The hashtag for that event is #ObesityCareChat.