About
I’m a doctor who got tired of the ninety-second version.
I’m Elise Hall. I’m a board-certified internist in Los Angeles, twenty-one years into practice, and for most of that time I have been having a version of the same conversation about weight — usually in the last four minutes of a visit scheduled for fifteen.
That conversation got much more complicated, and much more urgent, when GLP-1 receptor agonists arrived. Suddenly there was something that worked, at a scale nothing before it had worked, and almost none of my patients could get a straight account of it. What they could get was a great deal of marketing, a great deal of moralising, and a fifteen-second video from someone with excellent lighting and no license.
So I started writing the version I wished I had time to give in the room. Not simplified — my patients are not simple — but sourced, honest about uncertainty, and free of the quiet judgement that has followed this subject through medicine for decades.
Then, in late 2025, I started taking one myself. That was not a content decision; it was a decision I put off for two years for reasons I have written about and am not especially proud of. Once I had made it, publishing the year seemed more useful than not.
The two halves of this site are deliberate. The Research is where I read the literature carefully and show my work. The Journey is where I tell you what it was actually like. I keep them separate because they are different kinds of evidence, and blurring them is how good clinicians turn into bad influencers.
- Training
- MD, Internal Medicine
- Board certification
- Internal Medicine
- In practice
- 21 years
- Based in
- Los Angeles, California
- Writing since
- 2025
Editorial standards
Everything is cited
Claims link to the trial, the guideline, or the FDA label they come from. If I am reasoning from clinical experience rather than published evidence, I say that in the sentence where I do it.
No money changes hands
No sponsorships, no affiliate links, no supplement codes, no compounding pharmacy partnerships, no telehealth referral fees. I take no payments from any manufacturer of any drug discussed here.
Tools I name, I use
I write about the apps and equipment I actually use, because being vague about them helps nobody. Any entry that names one carries a disclosure at the foot stating my relationship to it, and I would tell you if that relationship ever changed.
Uncertainty is stated, not smoothed
Large parts of this field are genuinely unsettled — bone density, long-horizon outcomes, use across the menopausal transition. Where I do not know, I write that I do not know.
Corrections are visible
When new data changes a piece, I revise it and date the change at the top. I do not quietly edit an old position into a new one.
This is not a clinic
I do not accept patients through this site, I cannot give individual medical advice by email, and nothing here creates a doctor–patient relationship. I say this often because people ask often.
Getting in touch
What I can and can’t answer.
I read everything and answer what I can. I genuinely cannot give individual medical advice — not a dose, not a switch, not a “does this sound normal.” Those belong with a clinician who has your chart. What I’m glad to receive: corrections, papers I should read, and questions that would make a good piece.
hello@drhallnotes.comThe Sunday letter
The best way to keep up. One letter, most Sundays — what I read that week, what changed my mind, and where I am in my own year.