Janelle Duah, MD, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine (General Medicine) at Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Duah says she always knew she wanted to be a primary care physician, and that also specializing in obesity medicine was a natural choice.“My parents still have a picture hanging up of me when I’m 3, wearing my mom’s white blouse and holding a toy stethoscope to my younger sister’s heart,” Dr. Duah says. “I have congenital heart disease and I grew up going to doctors often and appreciate the lasting relationships you can form.”However, when she would accompany her parents to various medical appointments, she found that their care was disjointed. “We had to travel an hour and a half from our neighborhood in Brooklyn to get to many of their doctors’ offices, where we would have long waits, and then the prescriptions would pile up and things weren’t explained to them like they were to me,” Dr. Duah says.This, Dr. Duah says, allowed her to see the lost opportunities in primary care. “If we start early and can instill education in patients from the get-go, they maybe don’t need specialists for their heart or their lungs later on,” she says. “And in my own family, we had obesity and all the comorbidities that go along with it like high blood pressure, cholesterol, and diabetes, running rampant. I’ve had issues with weight management myself since I was a little kid. I knew I needed to lose weight, and was often told to lose weight, but I was never told how to do it.”Dr. Duah graduated in medicine at the University at Buffalo School of Medicine (Cum Laude) and completed her Internal Medicine Primary Care Residency at Yale.