The American Medical Association has recognized obesity as a chronic medical disease, which requires medical treatment.
The American Medical Association has decided that obesity be recognized as a disease that needs more attention and medical treatment. The association feels that people, insurers and the government need to get serious about the disease and invest more in obesity treatments.
The decision was made at the American Medical Association (AMA) Annual Meeting in Chicago.
People with this condition are exposed to various diseases including cardiovascular dysfunction, type-2 diabetes, obstructive sleep apnea, cancer and many others. One in three Americans are found obese, according to a CDC report. There is a rapid increase in obesity among both children and adolescents, which has increased by 2-3 folds in the last 30 years.
AMA's decision has no legal authority, but the words coming from the most respected representative of American medicine will influence the "policy makers who are in a position to do more to support interventions and research to prevent and treat obesity," says Samuel Klein, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, according to USA Today.
Following the trend of obesity increase in the past few years, it is likely that in the next seven years more than 40 percent of Americans will be obese, estimate researchers with RTI International, a non-profit organization in North Carolina's Research Triangle Park. The cost to treat an obese patient is significantly higher than treating a normal patient. Almost $1,400 extra is spent annually to treat obese patients compared to normal weight patients.
The shortcoming of recognizing obesity as a disease is that people might expect a pill or a drug to "cure", which is unlikely to happen. Several medicine companies have tried to develop drugs for weight loss, but have done so in vain.
"It is very, very difficult, once people get fat, to lose fat and keep it off," Dr. Michael Joyner, an exercise physiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. says. "We live in a low-physical-activity, high-calorie, high-food-variety environment," he added. "We are bombarded with images of food."
But AMA hopes that the decision may help the policymakers make new laws focusing on public health. Joyner says that policymakers should bring in new measures for obesity just like they did to reduce smoking and drinking alcohol in the past.
