Mogens Poppe
Mogens has been a GP for the last 20 years after a broad hospital based training program in a number of places around New Zealand. He has been in Ohope since 2002 and developed an interest in obesity management prompted by his daily exposure to health problems associated with excess weight in his general practice.
Doctor-led HCG based Weight Based Management Programme Concurrent Workshop Repeated Friday, 13 June 2014 Start 11:00am Duration: 55mins Room 7 Start 12:05pm Duration: 55mins Room 7 The Ministry of Health found that 65 % of New Zealand adults were either over-weight (37%) or obese (28%). About 160,000 New Zealanders have been diagnosed with diabetes and experts estimate that another 80,000-100,000 adults and adolescents may have already developed diabetes without even knowing it yet. Risk factors for a number of other diseases increase with weight gain like heart disease, cancer, osteoarthritis, stroke, depression and possibly dementia to only name a few. Faced with little else to offer than to advise his patients to eat less and exercise more he travelled to conferences and courses in Australia, Argentina, Europe and the United States to first find out and then to train in HCG based obesity management, adapted a number of different aspects to New Zealand conditions and started managing overweight and obese patients in Ohope in 2011. Combined with a very low calorie diet, a specialised nutritional support, regular weekly patient group meetings and numerous individual consultations, the programme has been very successful and a number of patients claimed that the programme has “changed their life”. An audit of results showed that the average weight loss after six weeks active treatment and a 3 week stabilisation phase was 11.7 kg or a loss of 12.5 cm of waist circumference. Overall patients achieved 94% of their targeted weight loss. Even better, a look at the same patients one year after completion of the programme, revealed that despite an average weight gain of 600grams the overall weight loss was still 11.1 kg. Together with the weight loss came a significant reduction in blood pressure medications, at times even reversal of diabetes, a much improved overall outlook on life and certainly a much higher self- esteem reported by the patients. GPs are in an ideal position to engage with their overweight patients and to consider offering a similar programme for the benefit of their patients and their own job satisfaction.