Who is Dr. David Maglakelidze?

I'm David Maglakelidze, MD, and most patients end up calling me "Dr. Mag". I am a physician double board-certified in internal medicine (ABIM) and obesity medicine (ABOM), and an attending physician at Yale New Haven Hospital. I'm currently establishing apersonalized, membership-based primary care practice built around a simple conviction: medicine works best when your doctor truly knows you, has time for you, and answers when you call. Obesity medicine is the practice's extra depth: metabolic health and weight, treated with rigor and respect inside your primary care rather than referred away.

Training

I am board-certified in internal medicine by the American Board of Internal Medicine (2023) and board-certified in obesity medicine by the American Board of Obesity Medicine. I earned my medical degree at David Tvildiani Medical University's AIETI Medical School in Tbilisi, Georgia, and completed internal medicine residency training on two continents, first at Tbilisi State Medical University, then at NYC Health + Hospitals / Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York, a 371-bed safety-net hospital where residency means everything at once: the ICU, codes, procedures, point-of-care ultrasound, and above all volume and variety of real human illness.

Along the way I trained beyond the wards: at the National Institutes of Health, I completed coursework in cancer prevention and control and molecular cancer prevention (2019, on an NIH scholarship), and earlier in my career I coordinated clinical trials, including a Phase IIb study in fatty liver disease and non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, conditions that sit at the very center of metabolic health and obesity medicine.

Yale New Haven Hospital

Since 2023 I have practiced as a full-time internal medicine attending physician atYale New Haven Hospital, a major academic referral center affiliated with the Yale School of Medicine. My daily work is caring for medically complex patients, people admitted with several serious conditions at once: diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, kidney disease. I supervise and teach internal medicine residents and medical students, respond to rapid-response and code events, and serve on patient-safety committees, translating what I see at the bedside into system-level improvements.

Hospital medicine teaches you to hold the whole picture, because in a complex patient nothing exists in isolation. A medication that helps one problem can worsen another; a plan that looks right on paper can fail if it doesn't fit the person's actual life. Those lessons shaped how I think about weight care. Obesity rarely travels alone; it is deeply intertwined with the very conditions I manage on the wards, and bringing hospital-level clinical judgment to outpatient obesity medicine means I'm comfortable caring for patients whose weight is tangled up with real medical complexity.

While at Yale, I was honored as aNominee, Young Physicians Leadership Academy, Yale, a nomination that reflected the part of medicine I care about most: how physicians communicate, lead, and build systems that actually serve patients.

Why obesity medicine

Prevention has been the through-line of my career since before medical school ended. At the National Cancer Center of Georgia I coordinated the implementation of the national cancer registry, ran a tobacco-control program in schools, and volunteered in palliative care, work that taught me early how much suffering arrives decades after the missed chance to prevent it.

In the hospital, I meet the same story again and again: a patient whose diabetes, heart failure, or kidney disease traces back, in part, to decades of untreated obesity, and who had spent those decades being told to simply try harder. The science moved on long ago. Obesity is a chronic, relapsing disease with real biology: hormonal signals, genetics, and an environment engineered against us. What hasn't caught up is the care most people receive.

Obesity medicine is the rare field where we now have genuinely effective tools: thoughtful nutrition strategies, behavioral support, and modern medications. The biggest barrier is no longer the science but the way care is delivered: rushed visits, judgment instead of medicine, and one-size-fits-all programs. I chose this field because that is a fixable problem.

How I practice

My core belief is that communication is a clinical skill, as consequential as any prescription. In my practice, visits are long enough to actually talk. You have direct access to your physician, not a portal that answers in three business days. Every decision is shared: I bring the evidence and my judgment; you bring expertise in your own life; the plan is something we build together.

And one thing is non-negotiable: obesity is never treated as a willpower failure in my office. If you've felt dismissed, lectured, or reduced to a number on a scale, I built this practice for you.

Outside the clinic

I write regularly about obesity medicine: plain-language explanations of the science, the medications, and what good care looks like. You can read that work on thearticles page, or start withhow I approach obesity care. I speak English, Georgian, and Russian, and away from the hospital you'll find me on a soccer pitch, a ski slope, or, best of all, spending time with my daughter.