Telehealth companies that have seized on the boom in weight loss drugs are playing a bigger role not just in treating patients with obesity, but also shaping how the medical mainstream understands obesity.

A dominant player in the field, Ro, said Friday it has launched a new questionnaire designed to measure “food noise,” a term that people with obesity often use to describe incessant and debilitating thoughts about food. One of the aims of the scale, which was developed by academic researchers with funding from Ro, is to help assess whether treatments can “quiet” patients’ level of food noise, a concept that has become more popular in recent years with the advent of new GLP-1 drugs Wegovy and Zepbound.

The telehealth firm is already using the scale to track patients’ progress as they

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