Is Medication Effective at Treating Childhood Obesity?
The widening scope of the obesity problem has prompted medical professionals to rethink old conceptions of the disorder and its causes. As researchers Yanovski and Yanovski (2002) have explained, obesity was once considered either a moral failing or evidence of underlying psychopathology (p. 592). But this view has shifted: Many medical professionals now consider obesity a biomedical rather than a moral condition, influenced by both genetic and environmental factors. Yanovski and Yanovski have further noted that the development of weight-loss medications in the early 1990s showed that obesity should be treated in the same manner as any other chronic disease . . . through the long-term use of medication (p. 592).