The medical management of obesity is changing, thanks in part to new views on obesity and widespread adoption of weight-loss medications. There are ways to combine medications with surgery to achieve greater weight loss for patients, as well as novel ICD-10 diagnosis codes that can be used to increase reimbursement for obesity management, experts said during the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery 2025 annual meeting.
“There’s still so much stigma and bias with obesity,” said Marc-Andre Cornier, MD, the president of The Obesity Society and the director of the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Metabolic Diseases at the Medical University of South Carolina, in Charleston. Obesity should be thought of as a serious, chronic disease, he said, explaining that it results from inappropriate energy intake cues driven by a genetic predisposition to an “obesogenic” environment.