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Mark Holland was born in Seattle, Washington in 1963. He was raised mostly in California and, for a year, in Geneva, Switzerland. He attended High School in North San Diego County and graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of California at San Diego with a degree in general biology. He attended medical school at the University of California at Irvine and graduated as a medical doctor in 1989. Doctor Holland moved from California to Albuquerque, New Mexico in the summer of 1989 to pursue post-graduate medical training in Pathology at the University of New Mexico. After a year and a half, Dr. Holland decided that Pathology was the wrong medical specialty for him and he left to pursue a medical career that offered more direct patient contact. This led him to bariatrics or medical weight control. Dr. Holland started his own bariatric medical practice (called "Medical Diet Clinic") in the summer of 1991 and has, since then, treated over ten thousand people. When asked recently why he chose bariatrics as a medical specialty, Dr. Holland replied: "With the likely exception of tobacco, obesity ranks among the greatest preventible risks to the health of most Americans today and yet, it is still viewed more as a character flaw than as a medical illness. That is a tragedy, because excellent research demonstrates that obesity is very much a disease with genetic and environmental causes that have absolutely nothing to do with people's character. I believe my job as a physician is to put aside old-fashioned moralistic advice like 'just eat less' and instead teach people to understand the mechanisms of hunger and metabolism so that they can make intelligent and reasonable choices with food and physical activity. I also often prescribe weight control medications and I do this because they actually help. We know that diabetes and hypertension are two diseases strongly linked to weight gain and we treat those illnesses agressively with medications, so it seems reasonable to me that if we can use weight control medications to help prevent these illness, we are practicing good medicine." |
About Dr. Mark Holland |
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