“Tomorrow, March 4, during our webinar we will make our pages dedicated to the treatment of obesity and the role of surgery available to the public, we will ask to stigmatize the stigma, we will launch a petition to the Minister of Health to include the treatment of obesity in the essential levels of assistance, we will provide the details for easy access to our network of Obesity Treatment Centers, we will call together the patient associations so that a large community capable of welcoming them and accompanying them in the treatment process is formed “.
Thus Diego Foschi, president of Sicob, the Italian Society of Obesity Surgery and Metabolic Diseases on the eve of the webinar “Sicob with you against obesity” which will take place on 4 March during World Obesity Day. World Obesity Day it is launched by all scientific societies that are interested in this pathology. For this reason, on March 4, Sicob will bring together its members and those who want to participate in the webinar to develop the necessary initiatives to overcome these obstacles.
The webinar will be chaired by President Foschi and President-elect Marco Zappa, with speeches by past president Luigi Piazza and vice-presidents Maurizio De Luca and Giuseppe Navarra: “The purpose of World Obesity Day – says president Foschi – is to recall the attention of the social body, of people affected by obesity, of the political world, of the media and of professionals on the need to proceed quickly towards a process of prevention and truly effective treatment. In Italy we have six million obese people (10% of the population) and their number is destined to grow according to the entry of adolescents with childhood obesity, an affection for which we have the second position in Europe. Obesity causes a serious reduction in the quality of life and makes the appearance of other diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, atherosclerosis, cardiovascular diseases more frequent and makes us more susceptible to infections and their complications, including Covid 19. Yet the major obstacles to the fight against obesity are still many and are represented by ignorance of the “scientific” definition of the disease, by the social stigma, by the prejudice that paints the obese not as a patient but as a self-destructive hedonist, by failure to recognize obesity as a disease to be treated in the context of essential levels of care, due to the scarcity of networks dedicated to taking care of patients. Sicob will always fight against these prejudices, so that patients and the pathology have the right attention. Obesity was the first epidemic of the new millennium, let’s not forget it! “