How Health Care Bias Harms Fat Patients
Beyond the “obesity epidemic,” fat patients face another public health crisis—bias, disinterest, and misdiagnoses
A friend reached out from overseas, wanting to talk. “I tried typing it up, but it didn’t make sense.” When we talk, she is measured and reeling, dizzy from a visit with a new doctor.
Prior to this recent visit, she saw the same trusted doctor for decades, through her young adult life, through childbirth, through raising a now-teenage daughter. When she saw that doctor about a sudden change in her body, an inexplicable gain of 50 pounds, with no substantive changes to her regular diet, the doctor gestured toward a faded BMI chart and a diagram of a plate of food neatly divided into macronutrients. The doctor offered to prescribe Weight Watchers or Slimming World. “Calories in, calories out,” the doctor told her plainly. “Eat less. Move more.”
It was all so tidy, linear in a way that her body had never been. This is arithmetic; her body is algebra.
She checked with her husband, friends, family. Does she eat too much? Does she move too little? Each one reflected, then offered a reasoned and measured “no,” saying her habits mirrored their own.
