The visit starts with the request already made. She's read the coverage, watched a friend's results, maybe already priced out a compounded option — and she arrives asking for the prescription rather than the evaluation. The clinical work is figuring out what problem she's actually trying to solve.
Dr. Lucy McBride has practiced primary care in Washington, DC for more than twenty-five years and writes and speaks widely on treating mental and physical health as one clinical picture. In this session, she stays inside the visit: how to take the request seriously without simply filling it, what to ask before writing, and how to recognize when weight is the presenting concern rather than the underlying one. She works through where a GLP-1 is the right answer and where it isn't, plus how to keep the visit productive when clinician and patient aren't working on the same problem.
Lucy McBride, MD, is a primary care physician and cofounder of the Ackerly McBride Group in Washington, DC, where she has been caring for patients for over twenty-five years. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Medical School, with a master’s degree in pharmacology from the University of Cambridge as a Fulbright Scholar, she completed her medical training at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. McBride became a nationally recognized voice on the importance of addressing mental and physical health in tandem. She is the author of the popular weekly medical newsletter Are You Okay? and hosts the podcast Beyond the Prescription, where she pulls back the curtain on what it means to be healthy. Her writing has been published in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and USA Today, and she has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and PBS, advocating for a data-driven, patient-centered, holistic approach to healthcare.
Dr. McBride believes that health is more than the absence of disease—it’s about awareness of our medical facts, acceptance of the things we cannot control, and agency over what we can change. Health, she argues, is a process, not an outcome. Known for her compassionate approach and ability to distill complex medical topics into accessible conversations, Dr. McBride empowers patients with evidence-based information and nuanced guidance for everyday health decisions.
A native Washingtonian, she lives in DC with her husband, two blocks from her parents. She is the proud mother of three grown children. You can find her work at LucyMcBride.com.