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Dear Doctor, Here’s What Fat Patients Need From You
Fat patients are getting worse health care than ever. Here are 10 recommendations that can help.
I spent nearly a decade away from doctors’ offices.
I was insured. I could afford my copay. But I weighed around 400 pounds, and nearly every doctor I saw made it clear that bodies like mine weren’t worth their time. So I simply stopped going.
And I’m not alone. 62% of fat women report that they’ve experienced inappropriate or stigmatizing behavior at the doctor’s office. A 2018 study in the journal Body Image found that women with higher BMIs both experienced and internalized weight stigma at higher rates, leading many to postpone health care or avoid it altogether. For many of us, some of our most lasting experiences of stigma took place at the hands of health care providers.
It isn’t in our heads either. A 2003 Obesity Research study found that 50% of doctors described fat patients as “awkward, unattractive, ugly, and noncompliant.” A 2009 study in the Journal of Clinical Nursing found that a majority of nurses thought that fat patients “liked food, overate, and were shapeless, slow and unattractive.” And a 2004 study in Obesity found that 74% of medical students exhibited some level of anti-fat bias. The American Journal of Public Health concluded that anti-fat bias leads to “serious risks for [fat patients’] psychological and physical health, generates health disparities, and interferes with the implementation of effective obesity prevention efforts.”
Like all of us, health care providers have been raised in an era of fat panic and in a culture that reviles fatness wherever it’s found.
So, fat people aren’t getting thinner. And when so many health care providers regard us with judgment or even outright disdain, it means we’re also not getting the health care we need.
Of course, the harm that so many of us face at the hands of health care providers isn’t intentional. Most providers joined their field out of a drive to help others, not to harm them. But like all of us, health care providers have been raised in an era of fat panic and…
