Obesity is an epidemic these days. Here’s how it gets considered a disease:

White adipose tissue is essentially an endocrine organ. It influences the release of all sorts of chemicals into your body (adipokines and others). It can also create a disease effect in the body.

How it works is as follows: Fat cells swell and become engorged. When they die or lyse, they release debris into the surrounding tissues. Your body sends macrophages into the area to clean up the mess. This constant immune activity, also known as adisopathy, is very similar to the response to a bacterial infection. It creates systemic inflammation which can create a cascade of negative health problems.

Systemic inflammation can cause chronic pain by stimulating nociceptors. Even if one of your patients is working ok mechanically, they can still have pain due to systemic inflammation. Keep this in mind in case you have an overweight patient who has persisting pain.

Inflammation from the immune response plus the inflammatory adipokines can also lead to metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome includes obesity, hypertension, insulin resistance, diabetes, and eventually worse.

Further, osteoarthritis has been shown to be caused by chemicals and inflammation as well as mechanical problems.

Finally, these chronic inflammatory states can lead to cancer, including colorectal cancer among others.

If you want to offer the highest service to your clients, offer nutrition and weight loss along with chiropractic care. You can either do it yourself, hire a specialist, or find people outside the office to partner with. This type of value added offering will dramatically help your clients and offer you an additional source of revenue or referrals.

Studies:
Is adiposopathy (sick fat) an endocrine disease?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2658008/

Adipocytokines and the metabolic complications of obesity.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18987272

Recent advances in the relationship between obesity, inflammation, and insulin resistance.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16613757

Biomechanical factors in osteoarthritis
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3266544/

Obesity and colorectal cancer: Role of adipokines in tumor initiation and progression
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4017033/

Why Cancer and Inflammation?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1994795/