Years ago, when I was a university student, a raised bump with a hard carapace took over the space between the right side of my lower lip and my chin. It was hideous and frightening, and quickly grew to be about the size of a five-cent coin.<\/p>\n
The campus doctor looked me up and down \u2014 me with my soft belly and chubby legs \u2014 and asked why I didn\u2019t do more exercise, maybe join a sports team to \u201crun off that fat.\u201d As for the thing on my face, he shrugged it off. \u201cCould be anything. Gout, diabetes, high blood pressure,\u201d he said, looking at what was likely a wart. He was no different from the doctor I had when I was a fat kid, the one who used to demand I take my shirt off so he could apply his stethoscope before counting my rolls of fat. Another doctor, another humiliation.<\/p>\n
Fed up with being treated like an object rather than a patient, I went home, lit a stick of incense and blew on the tip until it was red hot. I dipped a pen knife in vinegar and sliced the warty bit off, cauterizing the wound with the burning end of the incense. Like many people who avoid going to doctors, I\u2019m a skilled self-surgeon. After the wart incident, I did not see another doctor, for any reason, for a decade. I didn\u2019t join any damned sports teams either.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re overweight, you\u2019ve probably had a \u201cpatienting while fat\u201d (PWF) experience. The differences between the experiences of statistically overweight and \u201cnormal-weight\u201d patients are well-documented in research.<\/p>\n
A terrifying 2016 New York Times<\/i> article<\/a> on poor patient care experienced by overweight people notes that too often, overweight patients do not receive adequate diagnoses. It recounts stories of people who have almost died because their illness was seen as a problem exclusively related to their body size. Their doctors viewed them through the \u201cfat lens.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course overweight people know that we should lose weight. Memo received. But our body size is not all-defining.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In a blunt essay titled \u201cDoctors Don\u2019t Like Fat People,\u201d in-Training <\/i>writer Annika Burnett cites a Yale psychology study that concludes \u201ceven health professionals who specialize in obesity exhibit high levels of anti-fat bias<\/a>, including endorsement of stereotypes that fat people are \u2018lazy,\u2019 \u2018stupid\u2019 and \u2018worthless.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The ironies in these studies would be laughable if weren\u2019t so harmful. While the medical industry never lets up about the obesity epidemic, practical issues go unaddressed, from the size of scanning machines to guidelines for drug dosages. Medical technologies are default-set to one standardized body type. And those same doctors worrying aloud about the \u201cepidemic\u201d are too often undereducated about their own biases \u2014 and how obesity plays out in the daily lives of their patients.<\/p>\n Of course overweight people know that we should lose weight. Of course we know that being overweight is not good for us. Memo received. But our body size is not all-defining. If an overweight person falls off their bicycle and breaks their forearm, their broken forearm is the medical priority.<\/p>\n When doctors apply the fat lens, they too often overlook whatever immediate, far more threatening problem is being presented by the patient. Even worse, they may not actually see it, because they\u2019re too distracted by our cultural obsession with body size.<\/p>\n \u201cMy family doctor simply wouldn’t acknowledge that I have rheumatoid arthritis,\u201d Ann*, a Berlin-based educator in her mid-40s, told me. \u201cI go to the OB-GYN and everything \u2014 from cramps to rashes to not getting my period to side effects from the pill \u2014 is because I\u2019m fat.\u201d<\/p>\n Sudden weight gain, a red flag for \u201cnormal-weight\u201d patients, is read as merely more of the same, as further evidence of a perceived failure to be less heavy. When Andrea*, who lives in Toronto, went to the doctor about a brain tumor, her doctor asked if she\u2019d considered diet and exercise. One of the side effects of Andrea\u2019s brain tumor was hormonally induced weight gain. \u201cThe disease would have been diagnosed sooner if the doctors saw my rapid weight gain as a symptom,\u201d she said, \u201crather than an opportunity for derision.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cObesity does not make patients immune to conditions smaller patients develop and vice versa,\u201d physician Jennifer Adaeze Okwerekwu wrote in a 2016 essay<\/a> for Stat News.<\/i> She points to two recent surveys showing that when doctors zero in on the possible dangers of obesity, they gloss over other disease risk factors.<\/p>\n