Ask Dr. Tague: “Why did you choose weight loss as you medical focus?”

When I went through medical school, we learned the typical things about how to diagnose a disease and how to prescribe a treatment. But I also went through the School of Public Health and studied the importance of how to get people healthy as the primary focus of taking care of people. Really, it's about health promotion as opposed to disease management. If you can prevent a disease, it's far more valuable to the person than waiting for the disease to develop and then trying to manage the disease. When I started my medical practice, I considered what are the main epidemics in our country right now? And it boiled down to a very few diseases that we're all familiar with. Number one is heart disease. Second is stroke, and along with that, Alzheimer's disease. As people get older, it's also diabetes, which we have an epidemic of, and cancer, which takes far too many lives. These five diseases have two things in common. They're far more likely in those who are overweight, and they're far more likely in people that don't have good nutrition as a regular rule. So when I started my career, I decided I wanted to help prevent those diseases in my patients. And I could only do that if I focused on two objectives. One being weight control with my patients, and. And the second being helping them to achieve excellent nutrition, which is my goal for each and every patient.