"Thank you for talking to me about my weight"

I had a wonderful moment with a patient today.  She is a delightfully young middle-aged professional, who I've been treating for neck pain with a combination of physical therapy and injections.

She's by any normal sense of the world a wonderful person.  She's also a bit overweight.  Aesthetically, she's great, and she's certainly not the most overweight patient I work with, but she meets the medical criteria (BMI > 25), and more importantly I think that her weight is adversely affecting her healing, and will make it more likely she'll have recurrences in the future.

Today we were talking about the great progress she is making, and she made the very nice comment "thanks for talking to me about my weight.  My family has mentioned it to me before, but I really needed to hear it from you in order to make the final step to working on it.  Thank you."

This totally made my day.  As I've discussed in other blog posts before, I've personally struggled with obesity myself, and it's an every day challenge for me to keep my habits in check to make sure that I am the best possible version of myself every day.

It's also hard to counsel patients about weight.  I mean to really counsel them- have the hard conversations that lead to real change, not a token conversation so that you can check off a box on your electronic medical record.

Moments like today, though, are a useful reminder that it's worth it.  I love my patients and I am rooting for them to succeed, so it would be a disservice not to offer the feedback they need to meet their goals.

So Ms. Wonderful (you know who you are)- thank you for being you!