The Social Clinic
Where biology meets biography,
and medicine meets meaning.
Independent continuing professional education exploring the psychological, social and cultural dimensions of health and clinical practice.
Explore Beyond Weight ↓Beyond Weight
A Social Clinic on GLP-1 medicines, appetite, stigma and the clinical encounter
GLP-1 medicines have changed what medicine can do about weight. The clinical encounter has inherited everything else.
GLP-1 medicines have unsettled some remarkably persistent ideas about appetite, effort, willpower, responsibility and what successful weight loss is supposed to look like. Beyond Weight brings contemporary clinical evidence into conversation with the psychological, social and cultural dimensions of weight and weight-loss treatment.
This is not a prescribing course. It is a course about what prescribing encounters.
Register your interestCourse in development. RNZCGP endorsement will be sought; endorsement has not yet been granted.
One changing conversation.
Each live session introduces a problem. Between sessions, participants take a short observation back into practice, then return to reconsider what they noticed.
How did we get here?
Weight-loss medicine, appetite and the problem of willpower. From earlier pharmacological treatments to GLP-1 medicines, we ask where the problem has been believed to reside: body, appetite, behaviour, environment—or character.
NOTICE → How do patients and clinicians talk about effort?
When wanting changes
Stigma, desire and the moral economy of weight. Food noise, treatment stigma, deservingness, identity and what patients may be asking weight loss to change.
NOTICE → What lies between what the patient asks for and what matters?
Beyond the prescription
Putting biology, biography and meaning back together: culture, context, expectations, stigma, goals, agency and the clinician’s own assumptions.
RETURN → What will I do differently in my next consultation?
Encounter → Notice → Return → Reconsider → Try → Reflect
This is not three webinars. It is a small-cohort learning programme designed to unfold across clinical practice. No lengthy homework. No performative reflection exercises. Just better questions.
Biology matters.
So do biography, culture, institutions, relationships, stigma, desire and the social world.
Healthcare increasingly has extraordinary capacity to intervene in biology. But biological change occurs in people whose lives cannot be reduced to biomarkers, diagnoses or prescriptions.
The Social Clinic creates professional education for the territory between them.
Evidence without reduction.
Complexity without obscurity.
Theory that earns its place in practice.
Dr Andrew Dickson
Social theory made clinically useful.
Andrew is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Otago whose work crosses health, organisation studies, sociology and psychoanalytic theory.
His doctoral research examined the psychological and social dimensions of weight loss, appetite and weight-anxiety, including his own experience of pharmacologically mediated weight loss. His broader work explores how institutions, professional knowledge, culture and social structures shape people’s experiences of health and healthcare.
He founded The Social Clinic to create rigorous, independent professional education in the parts of clinical practice that biology alone cannot explain.
The aim is not to make clinicians into social scientists. It is to make social science clinically useful.
Independent by design.
Programmes draw on peer-reviewed research, contemporary clinical evidence and relevant scholarship from the social sciences and humanities. Evidence, uncertainty and competing interpretations are distinguished explicitly.
No pharmaceutical sponsorship. No medicine or manufacturer promoted. No commercial influence over programme content.
Because good clinical education should be able to ask questions about medicine without having to sell one.
Three weeks. Eighteen places. Better questions.
Three 60-minute live online sessions, a digital Field Guide, clinical cases, between-session Field Notes, applied assessment and post-programme reflection.
NZ$395 incl. GST per clinician.
Register my interest →No spam, no pharmaceutical marketing. Just course dates and relevant updates from The Social Clinic.