A Crack in the Dam?
 

Earlier this week I had to see my doctor as a follow-up to emergency surgery that I had while out of town on vacation, and he said that "Low Carb was definitely the way to go to lose weight," and that he was starting a low carb diet! From a member of the medical community, I thought that was nothing short of miraculous. Now if I can only get him to stop pushing statins...

Love that. I see a reproductive endocrinologist and was pleasantly surprised when he was telling me that a low carb woe was really the only way insulin resistant people can lose weight... I was thinking FINALLY a doc that knows what he's talking about :)

The medical community is slowly coming around to this WOE. The doctor I had through high school and well into my 20's has touted low carb for years and most of his staff eat low carb.

My father-in-law was recently diagnosed as borderline diabetic by his family doctor and was told that low carb was the way to go for him.

You've got a smartypants doc there! :p

Congratulations to both of you for having doctors that "get it." And thanks for sharing--we can hope that eventually this sort of perspective from a doctor becomes routine--or that at least the medical community recognizes and accepts more than 1 way of losing weight (e.g., low carb as well as lowcalorie/highcarb approaches).

Now if only my insurance plan at my workplace would accept this ... I'm so tired of getting e-mails and mailings about how I should be eating lowfat and loads of "healthy whole grains" and losing weight immediately!

I was first put on a low carb diet by a wonderful endocrinologist. He was one in a million.

I read a study in a credible journal that physicians are much more likely to follow lowcarb diets to lose weight themselves than to prescribe lowcarb weight loss plans to their patients. (Sorry I don't have the citation.) I guess that there's a view that superior people like themselves can be disciplined enough to stick to lowcarb and not mistakenly combine high fat with high carb, but their patients probably can't be trusted to get it right. I hope this view is changing, as the benefits of low carb weight loss for the insulin-resistent get more press, and the poor support for the fat-heart disease hypothesis gets more taken for granted in the medical literature.

A low carb woe was recommended to me by my doctor about 15 years ago. She had just diagnosed my diabetes.

A LC diet may be at odds with what insurance clerks deem appropriate. It's not like physicians have much to say about how they practice medicine anymore.

Yeah....I wish any of my doctors felt this way. I take my parents to a pretty prestigious and renowned hospital, Vanderbilt UMC in Nashville TN. The cardiologists up there have posters and pamphlets everywhere about "heart healthy low fat diets" with the food pyramids with the grains on the bottom. Don't eat fat, fat is the enemy and so forth. UGH. If these "cream of the crop" doctors haven't come around yet, then I don't have much hope for the rank-and-file doctors closer to home.

Jmc - that's funny. I went to Vanderbilt 25 years ago and the fat-gram counting diet was started there. We were the guinea pigs in Rand Hall (the cafeteria). What was it called? The t factor? I remember eating so many jelly beans because they had no fat! And yet I was starving all the time and never kept the weight off. Hmmm, funny that...

My mom's doctor recommended the Dukan diet. Things like that amaze me.

I read recently that Tennesse has the highest per capita rate of prescriptions in the country.
Capitalism. Profit rules.

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I think there may also be a fear of lawsuits. Suppose you prescribe a low-carb, high-fat diet to a patient who then has a heart attack. (It could happen - LCHF reduces the risk of heart disease, but doesn't eliminate it!) Can you imagine the headlines? "Doc Kills Heart Patients With Bacon And Egg Diet".

(Not that far fetched - every time I surf past the local news, they seem to have some health-related scaremongering.)

On the other hand, if you prescribe a low-carb diet, it won't work ... but the odds are no one will sue you or do a Channel 9 Special Investigative Report.

I think that as the evidence for low-carb becomes better known, and as there are more books that explain the science for people who don't read medical journals, it'll become easier for doctors to discuss low carb without worrying about lawsuits and backlash.

PPPPPPPFFFFFFFFTTTTTTTT You mean the copy of the T-factor diet that is sitting on my bookshelf not 5 feet away from me as I type this? Yeah, one of my wife's doctors was preaching that crap. Jellybeans and plain popcorn and baked potatoes. Sounds crazy. They get by with a lot of nonsense because people figure "Hey if it came from freaking VANDERBILT it HAS to be the real deal, right???"

That very one! We were all so impressed with ourselves at the time. Hey - no fat grams in alcohol! Everywhere you went you got fat gram counts. Blech. To cleanse the memory, I'm going to fry some bacon.

YES... not only that, but the primary care physicians are getting tracked by insurance companies to see if they do things like "diet education" with their diabetics and overweight patients (and you know what kind of education that ends up being). And if they ARENT doing it, they will get reduced payouts or taken off the list of preferred providers, because in the insurance co minds they arent doing everything to promote health and reduce future health care costs.