Dr Jacqueline Jacques - Beyond Weight Loss: Integrative Care in the GLP-1 Era

Thank you for running through that.

You've had such an eclectic emergence of so many different fields, like starting through pain and then seeing the impact, of course, of our weights influencing pain and then the metabolic effects that you're getting from shifting that way.

I think this is what is fascinating and why it positions you as a great leader in this field is because of your eclectic experience through this over time.

Like, it's interesting to think that...

As you said that, just to think that 30 years ago, insulin resistance wasn't, we didn't have language around this.

We didn't have an understanding of those pathological mechanisms.

And do you think that we're at a similar frontier now in the sense of our understanding of metabolism, obesity, with the emergence of GLP-1 agonists, that we're starting to evolve our understanding to the next level again around how weight, metabolism, and then almost like the networked effects that we're starting to see from that?

Yeah, I think particularly that last part, the network effects, right? You know, it's been a progression from we really saw the understanding of GLP and related incretins, particularly in diabetes and metabolic health very early on as powerful tools there.

And then really the next unlock, if you will, is everything that we're seeing now in the treatment of obesity.

And Now we have two things kind of happening.

We have more complex, what I would call poly drugs being developed, which are going to hit not just GLP, but multiple incretin targets at the same time.

And we have, because of that network effect, because many of the effects of really a metabolic health doesn't just affect the your blood sugar regulation and your body weight, right? I mean, I think integrative practitioners know that better than anyone else, right? There's an impact on inflammation globally in the body.

There's an impact on the liver.

There's an impact on the brain.

There's, you know, impact on mood.

So we're you know, really starting to, I think, see the bigger picture of how much metabolic dysfunction is really a root cause problem.

And, you know, on the one hand for medications, that's going to mean that we're going to see more of them.

We'll see expanded uses.

On the other hand, I think it should give us more powerful rationale for many of the things that we've talked about forever in integrative medicine, right? So it's, you know, it's, it's, it's a both.

And I think that I'd love to talk about that downstream effect or that collective network effect in a little bit about where we're starting to see the research pointing towards GLP-1 agonists and,

you know,

polytarget drugs on, on incretins and of effects that we're seeing through other aspects of physiology besides weight gain or metabolic health.

But one thing that you just mentioned there, which I think is interesting to touch on is around in integrated medicine or certainly in naturopathic medicine, we've probably had a very strong focus on the idea of resolution of obesity.

And what I think is something that's interesting as we start to see this landscape change, and this is certainly something I've heard you speak about, is that idea around chronic obesity being a ongoing disease.

And then requiring some level of ongoing management.