If you want to understand Dr. Lucy Burns, start with the frustration. Not the quiet, professional kind practitioners learn to contain over long careers, but the kind that eventually demands an answer.
Dr. Burns is an Australian medical doctor, general practitioner, certified lifestyle physician, and holder of qualifications in CBT, Medical Hypnosis, and Behaviour Change. She has spent years working with women navigating the complicated terrain of menopause, metabolic health, weight management, and chronic disease risk. And at a certain point, watching the options available to her patients become increasingly impersonal and commercially driven, she did what a certain kind of person does: she stopped waiting for something better to appear and built it herself.
The result, across years of clinical and entrepreneurial work, is a model of care that is difficult to categorize neatly and easy to describe simply: healthcare that treats the whole person, the body, the mind, and the life surrounding both.
The Problem She Refused to Accept
In January 2025, Dr. Burns founded RLM Telehealth, a company created to address what she saw as a significant gap in the telehealth market. She describes her motivation with the same directness that defines her clinical approach.
“I was sick of poor-quality telehealth options run with aggressive marketing and very little continuity of care. So I began my own company to fill a void I saw for patients who want quality care.”
What she built instead was a patient-centered telehealth practice focused on metabolic health and weight management, mental health, and menopause care. The philosophy underpinning it rests on a strong foundation of lifestyle medicine combined with what she describes as responsible and informed pharmaceutical prescribing.
That pairing reveals something important about Dr. Burns’s worldview. Lifestyle medicine, in her view, is not positioned against pharmaceutical care. It is the framework that makes responsible prescribing genuinely effective.
The team she assembled at RLM Telehealth is intentionally small, collaborative, and clinically integrated. Following consultations, they communicate directly with patients’ general practitioners, a detail she emphasizes because, in the current telehealth landscape, it is far less common than many patients assume.
“We actually do,” she notes pointedly, “not just say we do.”
Eight Years of Real Life Medicine
Long before RLM Telehealth, there was Real Life Medicine.
Dr. Burns co-founded the company in June 2018 alongside Dr. Mary Barson and has spent years building it into one of Australia’s distinctive voices in women’s metabolic health. Operating as an online platform, Real Life Medicine delivers evidence-based programs designed primarily for women between the ages of 40 and 60 navigating menopause, metabolic dysfunction, and emerging chronic health concerns.
Its flagship offering, the 12-week Mind Body Rebalance program, addresses three interconnected dimensions simultaneously: metabolic improvement, mindset transformation, and practical behavioral tools that fit into already demanding lives.
The program reflects the breadth of her training across multiple disciplines. Her qualifications in CBT, Medical Hypnosis, and Behaviour Change are not decorative credentials on a résumé. They form the structural foundation of an approach that treats the mind and body as inseparable systems rather than isolated problems.
Women completing the programs frequently report increased energy, reduced bloating, improved mental clarity, and sustainable lifestyle improvements, outcomes that represent meaningful progress in metabolic health and long-term disease prevention.
Real Life Medicine has also expanded into the corporate sector, delivering health and wellness workshops, retreats, and educational programs both online and in person for organizations seeking a more comprehensive approach to employee wellbeing.
The Podcast and the Platform
In November 2020, Dr. Burns became co-host of The Real Health and Weight Loss Podcast, extending her clinical philosophy into a broader public platform.
The podcast has become a natural extension of her work: a space where evidence-based medicine meets practical, accessible conversation. Through it, she translates complex concepts surrounding obesity, menopause, metabolic health, and behavioral change into language that feels usable rather than intimidating.
She also conducts free masterclasses focused on menopause and weight management strategies, reaching women who may not yet have access to formal clinical care or who are still searching for trustworthy information in an increasingly crowded digital health landscape.
Together, the podcast, educational programs, and telehealth platform reflect a coherent philosophy about modern healthcare delivery: information, accessibility, and sustained support should not exist as separate services, but as interconnected parts of the same patient-centered system.
The Expert in the Room
Dr. Burns has spoken at numerous medical conferences on obesity and sugar addiction, areas in which she is widely regarded as an expert. Her perspective is grounded as much in clinical experience as formal research. She has spent years working with patients who intellectually understand what changes they need to make, yet find the implementation of those changes extraordinarily difficult.
Her work reframes the conversation around obesity and sugar addiction away from moral failure and toward biology, psychology, and behavior. It is not a conversation about willpower. It is a conversation about understanding the mechanisms that make change difficult and designing systems that work with human behavior rather than against it.
Her qualifications in CBT, Medical Hypnosis, and Behaviour Change allow her to approach these challenges with practical depth. She is not merely theorizing about why patients struggle. She has studied the mechanisms extensively and built her programs around addressing them directly.
“I’m passionate about helping women transitioning through menopause and beyond make the changes they need to restore their metabolic health, lose weight if desired, and avoid chronic disease.”
That final phrase, “if desired,” says something essential about Dr. Burns’s philosophy. It reflects respect for patient autonomy in a field that too often dictates outcomes instead of supporting individual goals.
More than eight years into Real Life Medicine, and now leading RLM Telehealth, Dr. Lucy Burns has built something that functions as both clinical practice and healthcare philosophy: care that is evidence-based, deeply human, and unwilling to settle for less than patients deserve.
In a healthcare system that so often asks patients to adapt to its limitations, she has consistently chosen to adapt the system instead.
