Empowered Patient Podcast Personalized Tech-Enabled Weight Care Includes Medications and Lifestyle Intervention with Dr. Rekha Kumar Found
Dr. Rekha Kumar, Chief Medical Officer at Found, is focused on weight care, not just weight management, to provide personalized medical care. GLP-1 medications have changed the landscape of obesity treatment, providing doctors with more effective tools for patients, but they don't work for everyone. With this telehealth approach, patients engage with the platform to determine a tailored treatment plan based on each patient's unique biology, lifestyle, and history. There is also an increased stigma around obesity due to the availability of GLP-1s, reinforcing the need for new medications and approaches based on real-world outcomes.
Rekha explains, "I would say the way GLP-1s have changed this entire field of medicine is that doctors now feel like they have a tool that works that they can offer their patients. Although GLP-1s don't work perfectly in everybody, and there may be people who don't respond well to them for decades or longer than decades, doctors felt like all they could tell patients was to eat less and exercise more. Even when doctors said that, I think they felt like what they were offering wasn't very useful. Now, an actual tool, or a class of medicine, can be very effective for patients."
"I am looped into the conversation on stigma. In some ways, it’s been helpful to that conversation in the sense that people like Oprah have come out and said that now she realizes biology is involved in body weight control and that thin people are wired differently. They don't have as much of a preoccupation with food or noise."
"In some ways, it's reduced the stigma by bringing attention to the role of biology and hormones that contribute to our body weight that we don't have control of. Unfortunately, now that there is this tool that's so powerful, some would say that it's made weight stigma worse because if somebody chooses not to take this medicine, they're judged for not wanting to be thin."
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