Fat-22
The health risks of obesity may be exaggerated by (or in part caused by) the discrimination of health care professionals. Particularly, of course, when their patients are women. I’ll quote at length; the article really speaks for itself. (Shoutout to Suzy Smith, my Facebook friend, who is mentioned in the article.)
Recent studies have found, if you are an overweight woman you:
• May have a harder time getting health insurance or have to pay higher premiums
• Are at higher risk of being misdiagnosed or receiving inaccurate dosages of drugs
• Are less likely to find a fertility doctor who will help you get pregnant
• Are less likely to have cancer detected early and get effective treatment for itWhat’s going on here? Fat discrimination is part of the problem. A recent Yale study suggested that weight bias can start when a woman is as little as 13 pounds over her highest healthy weight.
“Our culture has enormous negativity toward overweight people, and doctors aren’t immune,” says Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Jerome Groopman, M.D., author of “How Doctors Think.” “If doctors have negative feelings toward patients, they’re more dismissive, they’re less patient, and it can cloud their judgment, making them prone to diagnostic errors.”
With nearly 70 million American women who are considered overweight, the implications of this new information is disturbing, to say the least.
Indeed. Very unsettling.
Via @TheFWord Twitter feed.
Posted by mo pie
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What a shock! I hope that these studies result in some changes in doctor training (for example, treating all patients, rather than some “ideal” patient) but I doubt it!
Everything would be great except the headless fatty picture.
Are you talking about the CNN article? Because it’s really disappointing. It reads like Ginny Graves, the writer, assembled it without actually seeing how the parts of it fit together, and has no real critical thinking skills.
She begins with telling us that “for women… as little as 13 pounds over her highest healthy weight” can lead to discrimination, but then she doesn’t ask why this affects women (and not men), instead shifting to look at fat people as a whole in a fairly ungendered way.
And of course, though 13 lbs isn’t very much, she does the classic move by focusing most of the article on seemingly objective equipment-based problems with treating very fat people (like stethoscopes hearing through fat and the problems of seeing cervixes and large enough tables, etc.) that probably don’t come into play for inbetweenies. And of course the media focus on really fat patients being too big for machines is part and parcel of reinforcing fatphobia.
It’s just a hot mess of an article with some good information from the Rudd center buried under layers of stuff that’s likely to cause the reader to ignore the issue of doctors malpractice due to prejudice.
Disappointing. But not surprising, given that it’s CNN.
Man, I wish I hadn’t read the comments over there, as there are quite a few people who think I should be dead from the cancer because I’m fat.
Like this one:
”
I haven’t read all of the comments but the example in the article of doctors not wanting to perform surgery on a woman who has cancer isn’t a person with a few extra pounds — it is a woman who is 5’3″ and weighs 400 pounds. Performing surgery under those circumstances is a death sentence.”
Ha, fooled his dumb ass, still alive and kicking. In fact I had a better post surgical outcome than many thin people have post nephrectomy. I was out of bed the next day, walking the halls of the hospital with a 16.5 inch incision from my breast bone to navel and inside of it.
I forgot though, I’m fat so I’m worthless. Sigh.
Added, the article was originally published in Health magazine, and on their website. I had no clue it would end up on CNN. Honestly it is kind of scary that it is getting wider view with me being that open in it.
http://living.health.com/2009/12/28/fat-discrimination/
There is the other link, and no headless fatties, just feet on a scale.
Ah, connections, I LOVE connections! A blogger over at Seed Magazine’s Science Blogs also picked up this story, as reported on CNN. Her headline is this…
“CNN Reports Overweight Decapitated Female Torsos Unhealthy, Unstylish”
http://scienceblogs.com/thusspakezuska/2010/01/cnn_reports_overweight_decapit.php?utm_source=selectfeed&utm_medium=rss
Her post is a good read. And reassurance that it’s not just fat people recognizing the discrimination against fat people.
I agree with Miriam that the story was certainly, well, lacking. I thought too much time was spent on apologizing for inherent discrimination that studies have shown to be rife among health professionals and not enough on the cultural stereotypes and sentiments that fuel it.
I’ll third Miriams assessment. And raise with; The article also gives us the usual left handed message we get with any other article regarding weight discrimination. ‘Fat people ARE discriminated against! But they wouldn’t be if they’d just lose weight.’ From the article-
“Being mistreated or dismissed by your doctor because of your weight is unacceptable. But what’s just as important is that doctors are missing an opportunity to help their patients lose weight and improve their health,”
-Yeah. I believe I can say with some confidence that I’ve NEVER seen an article that DOESN’T include some version of this disclaimer / cop out somewhere in it’s text. That’s the real Catch- You can Win but only if you lose weight. If you can’t lose weight, you don’t win. Oh, and BTW, there’s no such thing as ‘can’t. Have fun chumps.
Who’s defining the “highest healthy weight,” 13 pounds beyond which we start hitting the discrimination? Is this a BMI-based weight? How heavy the doctors think we look?
My spouse practices medicine.
She comes home and generally rails against her patients. She has said some things I wouldn’t say aloud to anyone.
For a while, this bothered me. After a while, I realized that, to her, the railing was a way of opening a valve full of built up pressure. People aren’t at their best when they are in pain, and then there are drug-seekers, the non-compliant and the horrible parents who come into the clinic. And then there are the constant threats of lawsuits.
That this kind of venting leads to — or feeds — a practice of dismissal, disregard and outright discrimination is frightening.
We talk about it from time to time. But i walk softly on this issue with her.
It is one thing to vent, Cindy, everyone needs to vent and often it isn’t pretty. It is another thing entirely when your prejudices lead to people being harmed by them.
The article leaves out a lot, like how I saw one of the doctors at Johns Hopkins (the one that recommended cryoablation) and he based his refusal to do the surgery on ONE patient. One patient, near my size who was 30 years older and in very bad health. And that patient didn’t die, didn’t have horrid complications, they had to go to a rehab center for a few weeks following surgery to get movement and the ability to walk back.
Had I listened to him and let my tumor be cryoed the likelyhood of the kidney cancer growing further goes through the roof. I was 33 when I was diagnosed with cancer, 33. Can you imagine being given a death sentence like that?
I had major surgery in 2006 at 409 pounds and 5’8″. I had my surgery laproscopically, which some doctors would decry as impossible for a person of my size. I did have one complication, but that was before surgery. I had an infection that they had to get under control with strong medicine, and that kept me in the hospital a few days longer than mormal. But I was very pleased with my treatment. It was obvious that I am the fat chick.
All that I ask is to be treated with the same respect and dignity that you offer to all of your other patients.
What also gets me about some doctors (that wasn’t covered in this article) is that some will actually support eating disordered behavior or ignore it in overweight/obese patients.
I also had one completely brush it off – I told him that I hadn’t had any change in problems since I had gained weight back, and that I have a long history of eating disordered behavior, both not eating and purging. His response was “that’s not how you’re supposed to lose weight.” He followed that up a moment later with “you’re a lovely young woman and you’d be even lovelier if you lost weight.” I think the look on my face at that silenced him; he proceeded to rush out of the room while I was in the middle of a question.
Somebody ought to be teaching apprentice doctors THE most important thing about their trade: they are repairmen-for-hire, nothing more. Just like the plumber or electrician, they may not be crazy about a customer, but they’ve bene hired by that customer to do a specific job to the best of their ability, and it’s not their place to do anything less than their very best. If you hire a doc who DOESN’T know his place, get rid of him & find another one – there are lots more where the unsatisfactory one came from!
There is no font big enough for the “NO SHIT, SHERLOCK” reation I had to this article.
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