Comment on doctors
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 day agoLook around your doctor’s waiting room. Everyone is fat.
Lots of people are old and age correlates with weight gain. But the volleyball player who blew out her ACL isn’t fat. Neither is the chem patient who is back for a final round.
How can those observations not color their general attitude?
Doctor: “Feels like everyone I see is either sick or injured”
Nurse: “Try spending less time in the ER”
Scubus@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I’m not sure your second point works, or maybe I just don’t understand it. It’s not like the doctor is making judgements that people are fat outside a hospital- they’re doing their job. You’ve got a car and it’s starter goes out every year, last time being a year ago. Your car wont start. Whats the first assumption?
It’s not ableist or bias to assume that the most common issue is the most likely issue. They see a ton of people whos problems are irrefutably due to their weight. It’s not the doctors job to make judgement calls on whether that person is wholly responsible for their situation, it’s their job to doagnose the problem and help take steps to fix it. The problem being their weight, the steps include: burn down capitalism and replace it with a system that doesnt incentivise companies to use the cheapest least healthy ingredients, or tell the patient unless they lose weight they’re going to die. One of these is completely pointless to tell the patient, the other gives them an unfair opportunity to potentially save themselves.
hissingmeerkat@sh.itjust.works 22 hours ago
Medical care for obesity is currently in most cars like telling someone with a broken starter that they need to run their car more instead of replacing the starter.
If eating too much compared to energy usage is unhealthy then there’s already something wrong with the patient that’s causing them to eat too much or expend too little energy. Telling them to lose weight might be the only thing within a provider’s abilities to do, but it’s equivalent to telling someone with a broken starter to leave the engine running.
It is abelist and biased to pass judgement on ones patients for having symptoms of physical, mental, social, or environmental ailments. When a symptom is already socially stigmatized a provider has a responsibility to care for the social impacts of that stigmatization as well, at the bare minimum in one’s own dealings with patient.
Scubus@sh.itjust.works 22 hours ago
Your first two paragraphs i agree with 100%. Your final paragraph i feel is accurate but id want to really mull over that before I really form an opinion. Obv in an ideal world it’s pretty easy to assign blame, but our legal and cultural issues are so fucked that topics like that really have to be analyzed in depth under the lens of how that would actually effect reality.
hissingmeerkat@sh.itjust.works 21 hours ago
You are implying you imagine some moral hazard where their provider minimizes the risk of the conditions the patient has, and as a result the patient stops seeking treatment. What you’re talking about in reality is shame. “Should a patient feel shame talking to their provider”?, and the answer to that is resoundingly “no”. Shame is a powerful demotivator, it’s function is to stop a person from doing something that threatens their relationships with others or the society they depend on. Trying to motivate someone with shame is counter-productive. All shame in a patient care setting can do is demotivate the patient from seeking care.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
Weight is a symptom not a cause. Metabolism, age, injury, psychology - these are causes.
Everyone dies. And big people have existed far longer than the advent of processed sugar. But asking people to adopt unhealthy eating habits in pursuit of a tiny waistline isn’t healthy.
Too often I see people conflating “Looking healthy” with “looking pretty”, absent any of the trade offs necessary to maintain appearances.
SHOW_ME_YOUR_ASSHOLE@lemm.ee 18 hours ago
Weight can cause plenty of issues, it’s both a symptom and a cause.