As a trained physician, seeing the many types of patients in Dr. Amy Lee’s years of practice, she has come to realize that what she does in treating a patient with obesity is a not straightforward. There is not one type of diet regimen for everyone, just as if there is not one pill that fixes all problems.

She finds herself working backwards by first, meeting someone with the condition of overweightness, followed by digging into their history on the root cause of the outcome. What needs to be recognized is the many causes, which could be genetic predisposition, environmental forces, complications from mental health, or simply taking a medication with adverse reactions of weight gain. In order for practitioners like Dr. Lee to carry out this job, they need the medical community as well as the ancillary services to recognize the complexity of what it takes to fully make an impact in this patient population. If they do not make changes and move forward, this epidemic of obesity will surely become the next pandemic. Dr. Lee’s hope in publishing Access: Addressing the Obesity Crisis is to share with her colleagues the “other side” of the practice often overlooked or under-recognized. This is an attempt to shed a little light to what they are doing as medical bariatricians and the impact they can make for their patients.

About the Authors

Dr. Amy Lee has spent most of her career, since her early days in her residency training in nutrition medicine. She is grateful that her foundation in Internal Medicine has given her a strong knowledge base in pathophysiology and disease states, while the nutrition knowledge allowed her to tie in an alternative therapy to everyday medical conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, chronic inflammation, and sports nutrition; just to name a few common ones. Lee is currently serving as the Chief Medical Officer at Lindora Clinic, a medically supervised weight loss program in Southern California. She is also the head of Nutrition for Nucific, providing up-to-date and evidence-based content for a line of nutrition supplement products. Her other interest (and part-time hobby) is rebuilding and reviving communities to provide low-income housing for those in need.

Douglas Ramsthel is a Partner at Burnham Benefits, one of the top fifty employee benefit consulting firms in the United States. He consults employers across the US on their benefit plan strategy, design, funding, and communication. With health insurance being the major cost for most employers, he has been successful in helping employers creatively reduce costs while not compromising the quality of benefits offered to employees. He is a recognized specialist in self-funding, consumer-driven healthcare, underwriting, and financial analysis. Within Burnham, Douglas not only helps provide firm leadership, but he is also the industry lead for Hospitality and Healthcare. Douglas has worked in the industry since 1986, and prior to joining Burnham, he worked at several large health insurance companies becoming very familiar with the insurance company perspective on health costs, tools to contain costs, operation and underwriting. He also spent several years with Deloitte Consulting. He obtained his B.S. in Economics from the University of Oregon, Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa in 1986.

Jessica Carpenter, RDN, MBA is originally from Long Island, New York. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Food and Nutrition from the University of Alabama, Honors College (Magna Cum Laude) before going on to complete an MBA/Registered Dietitian Coordinated Program at Dominican University. She is passionate about all things health and wellness, and believes that a preventive approach is much more effective than a treatment approach when it comes to long-term health. Currently, Jessica works at a marketing firm in NYC and is in the beginning stages of launching her own Nutrition Counseling program. In her spare time, she loves the outdoors and spending time with friends and family.