Before Myra Ahmad was a founder, she was a researcher trying to answer a clinical question: why do patients with obesity keep failing to get the care they need?
That research, conducted during her MD at the University of Washington School of Medicine and through positions at MIT’s Koch Institute and UCSF, is where her case against one-size-fits-all medicine actually starts. The company came later, as the applied answer to a diagnosis she’d already reached.
What she found in that research was structural. Patients with obesity were bouncing between bariatric surgeons, endocrinologists, and primary care providers. None of them were treating the underlying disease.
“Our healthcare system is optimized for billing codes rather than clinical outcomes,” she has said.
“Patients bounce from specialist to specialist, yet no one seems to ‘own’ their care.” That’s a clinical observation before it’s a business insight, and it’s the thing Ahmad points to first when explaining why she builds the way she does.
A Diagnosis Made Before a Company Existed
When providers are paid for the volume of encounters rather than whether a patient actually improves, there’s no incentive to individualize care.
Standard protocols become the default because they’re what a fragmented, throughput-driven system can administer at scale.
A patient’s specific metabolism, history, or response to treatment gets flattened into whatever the average trial population would need, because tracking the individual case takes clinical time the system isn’t set up to pay for.
That mismatch is what she carried out of the lab and into Mochi Health, which she founded in San Francisco in 2022.
Before it was a company, it was a clinical position: that patients need one accountable relationship managing their whole picture, not a standardized protocol administered across disconnected specialists.
The Data Behind Why Standard Dosing Fails
In a January 2026 op-ed for MedCity News, Ahmad cited a troubling pattern in GLP-1 treatment: roughly half of U.S. patients using the drugs for obesity care discontinue within the first year, with most regaining the weight in the year that follows.
Gastrointestinal side effects, driven largely by doses higher than many patients actually need, affect an estimated 40 to 70 percent of users, and cost compounds the problem.
Of 3,000 U.S. adults surveyed on GLP-1 use, 45 percent reported discontinuing treatment, naming cost and insurance barriers as the primary reason.
Ahmad’s argument is that standardized dosing manufactures both problems at once, pushing patients toward doses calibrated for an average trial population rather than their individual physiology, which raises side-effect burden and price simultaneously.
For a physician trained to treat the patient in front of her rather than the population average, that’s not an efficiency tradeoff. It’s a treatment failure with a predictable cause.
What Individualized Care Actually Requires
The alternative she has proposed clinically is microdosing: starting below the standard dose and adjusting gradually based on how a specific patient responds, rather than titrating everyone toward the same fixed target.
Patients are already reaching for this on their own. A 2025 survey found 36 percent of GLP-1 users were microdosing without medical supervision and another 32 percent had tried it previously, with 66 percent doing so to reduce side effects and 38 percent to make treatment affordable, the same two pressures driving the dropout numbers she cites.
Crucially, Ahmad frames individualized dosing as demanding more clinical oversight, not less. “Done correctly, this method demands greater medical supervision, not less,” she has written, because personalizing a dose introduces variables a rigid protocol never has to account for.
That framing is what separates her position from a simple argument for lower doses. It also fits evidence that many of the benefits of GLP-1s, including reduced inflammation, lower cardiovascular risk, and possible neuroprotective effects, aren’t strictly dose-dependent, meaning patients may retain meaningful gains at doses well below the standard.
Building the Company Around the Clinical Argument, Not the Other Way Around
Mochi’s structure is that clinical position translated into a business. Patients choose their own provider and keep that relationship as their needs change, with 24/7 access to physicians, nutritionists, and dietitians built around continuity rather than a single encounter.
It’s what Ahmad calls a “primary care home,” a model that only makes sense if the underlying premise is that individualized, ongoing attention is what treatment actually requires, exactly the premise her dosing research argues for.
The Argument Guiding Where This Goes Next
Most of the industry still treats personalized dosing as a niche practice. Ahmad’s clinical background lets her make the harder version of that argument.
The GLP-1 market will eventually stratify the way every major drug class before it has, moving from one standard product to a matched fit between patient and treatment, and that providers who can’t deliver that individualized oversight will be the ones left administering yesterday’s protocol.
She isn’t arguing this as a founder looking for a market opening. She’s arguing it as the physician who diagnosed the problem before the company existed to solve it.