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Type 2 diabetes is a potentially reversible disease. Patient education encompasses a deep investment of the health care providers, who with the aid of pedagogic tools, help the pa tient commit to this path. This facilitates the learning of uncommon knowledge and skills required. Whether or not it leads to a complete remission of the disease may not be the main purpose. The main goal lies in the patient's motivation to learn and change on a long term basis.

In the word obesity, a clinical concept of chronic systemic disease pairs up with pejorative individual or social representations. Being obese is also facing situations of disability, organ failure, uncertainty of the fate and stigmatization. A care concept inspired by rehabilitation and therapeutic patient education could offer a new way and other purposes to the treatment of obesity. Restoring functions, learning how to adapt and change their environment, obese people may live better today, out of their isolation and develop partners in their projects of life and health. Rehabilitation of an obese patient is much more than weight loss!

This article presents an approach of obesity centered on patients' experience. How is obesity defined by these latter? Is it considered as a disease? Is it apprehended by them as an element to fight or as a potentially meaningful event? Has the sick person the feeling to suffer from obesity or to have resources to face it? At the crossroads of three human sciences (sociology, anthropology and education), this approach aims to enrich and increase the efficiency of therapeutic patient education for obese patients. Extended experience narration extracts are presented in this article, obtained from research interviews. They show the importance of taking into account the "subjective experience" of the disease when accompanying persons affected by obesity.

Therapeutic patient education has been developed over more than 30 years, to better treat chronic patients. The purpose of this article is to summarize its efficiency, based on recent meta-analysis publications. This analysis reflects more than 500 studies concerning ten diseases. It appears that the educative interventions are poorly described and that it is frequent that the control group also received some basic education. Despite these biases, the efficiency of the therapeutic patient education is clearly demonstrated in the majority of the studies (60%), whatever the pathologies or indicators are. Concerning obesity, one can find exactly the same tendency, with consequent and long lasting weight losses.

Myocardial infarction is a frequent, serious and recurrent complication of a chronic disease: atherosclerosis. Therapeutic advances have improved the clinical outcome of affected patients and have shortened the hospital length of stay. However, to decrease the recurrence of cardiovascular events, it is essential to increase adherence to therapeutic projects by improving information given to coronary patients during the short initial hospitalization. This can be achieved by using tools that have been developed for the management of chronic disease: therapeutic education and motivational interviews. Moreover, these information tools have to perform well and have to be used at appropriate times to ensure a positive effect on patients.

Dealing with a long term chronic disease necessarily implies changes of behaviour. In the field of obesity, these behaviours concern habits which are very often firmly fixed in patients' lives. The study of patients' representations is of great interest in the medical field. Representations guide behaviours and therefore build up an important factor which determines the adherence to the treatment. Representations always have a foundation and making them rise up induces a non-judge-mental attitude. The health care provider can help the patient make them evolve. It must be highlighted that health care providers' representations are also important, particularly in the therapeutic relationship. This article proposes a reflection on the obese patients follow-up situation as well as some clinical implications.