#medical fatphobia

[fatliberation]

Do you know where I can find studies for fat bias in healthcare or disproving fatphobic stereotypes in any way? i’m looking to make a binder for my workplace at a hospital to show providers in a way to advocate for my fat patients

I recently compiled 29 sources on this - you’ll find more in my tag #resources.

NO WEIGH! For Professionals is a great primer on anti fat bias specifically for healthcare professionals.

#inbox #fat liberation #medical fatphobia #resources

[aleatoryw]

i've started looking at weight and health the way i look at class and income and it really puts a lot of things into a new perspective.

let me explain: in america at least, the lower class have significantly worse health outcomes, even when accounting for other factors. just being poor is enough to make your overall health worse. we don't know that being fat makes your health directly worse, like the data just isn't there, but for a moment, pretend it does.

imagine going to the doctor with a health problem and the doctor looking at your chart and saying well, this problem will be less severe if you go up an income bracket. have you thought about becoming rich? it would really help. start by saving a little money every month.

ridiculous, right?? very few people successfully go from working class to rich, it just doesn't happen on a large scale in society. maybe for a time you pick up some overtime hours, spend a little beyond your means, and appear rich. but eventually you burn out, your car needs to be repaired, and you return to being working class.

we do have this data: only some people can successfully lose large amounts of weight, and only a tiny fraction of people who lose that weight actually keep it off for more than a year. telling people to lose weight for their health is just absurd because they almost certainly can't do it any more than they can double their income for their health.

and yet i see it everywhere. a little poster in my work breakroom tells me to improve my blood pressure by losing weight! a psa on the radio says you need to take care of your heart by losing weight! we can't even conclusively prove that weight is the cause rather than just correlated with a lot of these problems but here it is offered anyway: have you tried being rich?

#medical fatphobia #personally i'm right in that sweet spot where doctors take me seriously but generic health advice is like !!!OVERWEIGHT!!! #but i recently got to hear allll about the essential diets from my mom so. thinking about it again

[whatbigotspost]

Some good news! The AMA is getting on the right side of some important stuff this week:

I’m the first to bring out snide, “gender affirming care is GOOD?!?????” And “the BMI is racist, fatphobic junk science?!???? CALL THE PRESSES!!!!” comments but I’m taking a sec to acknowledge this is actually really, really good.

The AMA is the largest professional association of medical physicians and carries enormous sway and power. We need them to move the needle on this shit, even if it is frustrating they feel years behind.

#gender affirming care #American medical association #BMI #fatphobia #racism #medical racism #medical fatphobia

[cripple-council]

doctors care more about weight loss than helping a fat chronic pain patient not suffer from crippling pain 👍🏻 what a world

#cripple punk #crip punk #cripplepunk #physical disability #physically disabled #c punk #cpunk #fatphobia #medical fatphobia #weight loss mention

[thebibliosphere]

Man, fuck doctors sometimes. I was finally able to see a neurologist with the intent of figuring out why about a month or so after a surgery I suddenly couldn't stand or sit upright without lower back pain. Like, very, VERY suddenly this came on.

And they told me to try losing weight about it after giving me a once-over.

And when I directly asked them if I wasn't what sh considered 'overweight', would she order many tests? Yes, she said she would.

I -did- get to make her backpedal by explaining I had worked hard to gain weight since for most of my life I was extremely underweight due to neglect, at least.

All this to say I relate to your tylenol woes. May we both find the help we need soon.

Man, doctors have such sticks up their asses about weight. I'm so sorry that was your experience.

I remember when I first moved here, and I started seeing a new healthcare provider. My symptoms weren't as bad yet, but they were heading that way, and the advice they kept giving me was to "lose weight."

I was 125lbs soaking wet. If that.

When I dropped... gosh, I think it was 30, almost 40lbs in about 3 months last year, I actually had a nurse congratulate me on it. Like no, Deborah, that's a sign there is something very, very wrong. (spoiler alert, it was my mast cells burning down my GI tract.)

Fatphobia literally kills.

#chronic health tag #fatphobia #medical fatphobia #tw weight loss

[goldyke]

LAP Bands should be illegal

This post is going to deal with medical fatphobia, weight loss surgery, coercion, emetophobia, food issues, disordered eating, and just all around bad shit. But it’s important.

Shortly after I reached adulthood, I was coerced into weight loss surgery. I weighed about 250 pounds and was considered morbidly obese.

The Lap Band is a disgrace to the medical profession and is just another example of how the medical profession does not care about the lives of fat people.

To preface this: the surgery works. I lost 70 pounds and people treated me differently and I hated them all for it.

The Lap Band made my life miserable. When it was filled, I could not eat until noon without getting stuck. Even then, getting stuck was always a risk. There was a strict diet to follow and you were supposed to be safe from that if you followed it. On top of that, there were rules for how you ate. One standard I saw was not to eat in bites larger than your fingernail. Can you see yourself doing that for a week, let alone years and years?

Getting stuck is a horror you can't imagine. The food lodges in the top of your stomach, blocking off your system. You continue to produce saliva and swallow it down. Slowly, the mucous in your saliva builds up. It feels like you're drowning. Eventually, you have to essentially throw it all up. A disgusting experience (and a mortifying one if you're in public.) The saliva is thick and ropy. This experience is often called "sliming" on the forums.

I became frightened of eating in public. In a way, I became frightened of food altogether. I knew something had to give the day I reacted to someone biting a hamburger in a tv show the way a regular person would react to a killer jumping out in a horror movie. I developed the disgusting and unhealthy habit of chewing and spitting out food. I completely lost my enjoyment of many foods I had previously enjoyed because of how problematic they were (I can no longer enjoy a chicken thigh for example.) I stopped eating meals and began grazing. I developed eating habits worse than the ones that "made me fat"

After 3 years, I had the band emptied of fluid, which significantly decreased, but did not stop, these problems. I regained the weight, and found it didn't bother me. (Along the way I discovered that my discomfort with my body had never been weight related)

I had my band removed after 6.5 years earlier this year. I am in a support group on facebook for victims of this malpractice. There are 5.6 thousand members, each with their own horror stories. Some of them cannot get the band removed because insurance will not cover the procedure, though they happily covered the band's placement. Some have tried to go through with removal but have had surgeons try to coerce them into getting a different weight-loss surgery instead of just removing it. Many have long-term damage from the band eroding the walls of their stomach or esophagus, or from the band adhering to multiple organs. Many of them had the band for 12-14 years, before removal because none of our doctors told us it needs to be removed within 10.

Many practices no longer perform Lap Band surgery and now believe it is unethical. The surgeon who removed my band still performs this surgery regularly.

A study performed in 2011 with 151 lap band patients, found that 22% of patients experienced minor complications and 39% experienced major complications. The person who coerced me into surgery actually experienced major complications and needed an emergency removal.

I experienced no serious complications. Everything I described above is considered normal. And It still drastically lowered my quality of life.

I don't know why I'm sharing this or who I'm sharing it for, but here I am. If you know anyone considering the lap band surgery, don't let them go through with it without knowing the truth. And please be kinder to your body than the medical profession wants you to be.

#fatphobia #medical fatphobia #emetophobia #disordered eating #fat liberation #please reblog actually

[lorax177]

Fun fatphobia fact of the day:

CMS/HCC is a way for insurance companies to estimate how much money a patient will cost to insure, based on the major problems they have.

This is my list of diagnoses.

I blacked out one of them because it is my intersex condition and has to do with my assigned gender, which I don't want to be associated with my online presence. Also, there are a few repeats because doctors will put in their own phrasing, so sometimes when I switch doctors, I get re-diagnosed with the same thing, with slightly different wording. It's also missing a few diagnoses i got as a kid, namely my autism and a comprehensive list of the specific learning disorders I have, because I didn't think they were relevant to a general practitioner and i didn't want them on my record for safety reasons. Anyways, you'll notice that there are several of them that have the aforementioned CMS/HCC label. Those are schizoaffective disorder, major depression (which is part of my sza,) and two counts of "morbid obesity". My adhd, which I need to take two different medications daily to treat sufficiently enough to function, is not labeled as a major disorder, but my size is. Twice!

You'll notice that nowhere on this list is any diagnosis that is supposedly related to my fatness. That is because, metabolically speaking, my health is perfect. My lipids, a1c, blood pressure, pulse, and o2 are all in the excellent range. I am not on any kind of medications for any of these, either. The fact that I have more body tissue than their ideal, which has no bearing on my actual health, is considered more important to address than my neurodevelopmental disorder that requires two expensive medications to treat. They think that I am more of a risk for them because of an imagined bogeyman of a diagnosis ("morbid obesity", aka being fat) than something which actually has real life functional and financial consequences (my severe combined type adhd). Or, for that matter, my ocd, which I needed intensive outpatient therapy for; my transgender identity, which has cost them thousands of dollars in hormones and surgery; my asthma, which requires two medications to treat; and my gerd, which requires one.

I'm not advocating for medical insurance companies to make it harder for people with these diagnoses to get treatment. I'm just pointing out that the medical system sees me as a drain on their resources specifically because of my weight rather than the diagnoses that actually cost them money (albeit with one exception). They think my adipose tissue, which is not causing me any health problems, is more important to note than most of my legitimate health problems.

That is medical fatphobia.

#fatphobia #medical fatphobia #sza #ocd #adhd #asthma #gerd #trans #autism #intersex

[ed-recovery-affirmations]

Sending all the love and support to fat chronically ill people who are told that all their health problems would disappear if they just lost weight. Sending all the love and support to fat people with physical disabilities who are told they wouldn't be disabled if they just lost weight. Sending all the love and support to fat people with any illness or physical disability who has been pushed to try diet and exercise regimens that are not safe for their health condition, and who are judged for not taking this advice.

ESPECIALLY sending love and support to fat people who have been given conflicting or dangerous information from the medical professionals who are supposed to be supporting them.

#fat posi #chronic illness #disability #medical fatphobia #diet culture

[prehistoric-faggot]

fat person: “i really hate how fat ppl are treated in our society, we are literally dying from medical fatphobia and are forced to loose weight before doctors will help you with an issue that has nothing to do with weight. they’d rather let us die than help us. eating disorders are rampant among fat people and we go without support and treatment because either no one believes us or they encourage restrictive eating disorders because they want us to loose weight. we get shamed for using fast fashion when there’s literally no ethical brands with affordable clothing in fat sizes. we are constantly told how unlovable, unattractive and worthless we are because of our weight. if ur not fat or have never been fat u will not understand.”

skinny ppl for no damn reason: “ok but consider this; someone told me to eat once and i find that oppressive.”

#fat liberation #fat acceptance #fat positivity #ed tw #fatphobia #fatphobia tw #medical fatphobia #weight tw

[spacedocmom]

Doctor Beverly Crusher @SpaceDocMom I truly do not understand why so many doctors in your era seem to hate chronically ill patients so much, enough to body-shame them and/or refuse to diagnose them properly and/or treat them with any degree of consistent care. Why become a doctor only to not care? emojis: black heart, blue heart, masked 2:24 PM · Mar 15, 2024

#star trek #doctor crusher #star trek the next generation #star trek tng #star trek memes #support #kindness #care #compassion #health care #healthcare #medicine #bad doctors #medical fatphobia #medical gatekeeping #medical abuse #medical gaslighting #chronic pain #chronic illness #chronic fatigue #spoons #spoonies

[fatliberation]

I totally understand and can empathize with fat activists when it comes to medical fatphobia. But I do think its important to provide nuance to this topic.

A lot of doctors mention weight loss, particularly for elective surgeries, because it makes the recovery process easier (Particularly with keeping sutures in place) and anesthetic safer.

I feel like its still important to mention those things when advocating for fat folks. Safety is important.

What you're talking about is actually a different topic altogether - the previous ask was not about preparing for surgery, it was about dieting being the only treatment option for anon's chronic pain, which was exacerbating their ed symptoms. Diets have been proven over and over again to be unsustainable (and are the leading predictor of eating disorders). So yeah, I felt that it was an inappropriate prescription informed more by bias than actual data.

(And side note: This study on chronic pain and obesity concluded that weight change was not associated with changes of pain intensity.)

If you want to discuss the risk factor for surgery, sure, I think that's an important thing to know - however, most fat people already know this and are informed by their doctors and surgeons of what the risks are beforehand, so I'm not really concerned about people being uninformed about it.

I'm a fat liberation activist, and what I'm concerned about is bias. I'm concerned that there are so many BMI cutoffs in essential surgeries for fat patients, when weight loss is hardly feasible, that creates a barrier to care that disproportionately affects marginalized people with intersecting identities.

It's also important to know that we have very little data around the outcomes of surgery for fat folks that isn't bariatric weight loss surgery.

A new systematic review by researchers in Sydney, Australia, published in the journal Clinical Obesity, suggests that weight loss diets before elective surgery are ineffective in reducing postoperative complications.

CADTH Health Technology Review Body Mass Index as a Measure of Obesity and Cut-Off for Surgical Eligibility made a similar conclusion:

Most studies either found discrepancies between BMI and other measurements or concluded that there was insufficient evidence to support BMI cut-offs for surgical eligibility. The sources explicitly reporting ethical issues related to the use of BMI as a measure of obesity or cut-off for surgical eligibility described concerns around stigma, bias (particularly for racialized peoples), and the potential to create or exacerbate disparities in health care access.

Nicholas Giori MD, PhD Professor of Orthopedic Surgery at Stanford University, a respected leader in TKA and THA shared his thoughts in Elective Surgery in Adult Patients with Excess Weight: Can Preoperative Dietary Interventions Improve Surgical Outcomes? A Systematic Review:

“Obesity is not reversible for most patients. Outpatient weight reduction programs average only 8% body weight loss [1, 10, 29]. Eight percent of patients denied surgery for high BMI eventually reach the BMI cutoff and have total joint arthroplasty [28]. Without a reliable pathway for weight loss, we shouldn’t categorically withhold an operation that improves pain and function for patients in all BMI classes [3, 14, 16] to avoid a risk that is comparable to other risks we routinely accept.

It is not clear that weight reduction prior to surgery reduces risk. Most studies on this topic involve dramatic weight loss from bariatric surgery and have had mixed results [13, 19, 21, 22, 24, 27]. Moderate non-surgical weight loss has thus-far not been shown to affect risk [12]. Though hard BMI cutoffs are well-intended, currently-used BMI cutoffs nearly have the effect of arbitrarily rationing care without medical justification. This is because BMI does not strongly predict complications. It is troubling that the effects are actually not arbitrary, but disproportionately affect minorities, women and patients in low socioeconomic classes. I believe that the decision to proceed with surgery should be based on traditional shared-decision making between the patient and surgeon. Different patients and different surgeons have different tolerances to risk and reward. Giving patients and surgeons freedom to determine the balance that is right for them is, in my opinion, the right way to proceed.”

I agree with Dr. Giori on this. And I absolutely do not judge anyone who chooses to lose weight prior to a surgery. It's upsetting that it is the only option right now for things like safe anesthesia. Unfortunately, patients with a history of disordered eating (which is a significant percentage of fat people!) are left out of the conversation. There is certainly risk involved in either option and it sucks. I am always open to nuanced discussion, and the one thing I remain firm in is that weight loss is not the answer long-term. We should be looking for other solutions in treating fat patients and studying how to make surgery safer. A lot of this could be solved with more comprehensive training and new medical developments instead of continuously trying to make fat people less fat.

#inbox #medical fatphobia #sources #surgery #anti fat bias #fat activism #fat liberation

[wither-is-suffering]

If one more fucking doctor looks at me and says starving is fine because I'm fat I'm going to kill someone

#I hereby state i will not kill anyone in the event this happens #or that because i have yet to receive diagnosis that my problems dont exist #tw medical #medical mistreatment #medical fatphobia

[fatphobiabusters]

We live in a world that is so oppressive of fat people that there are people who work in the medical field suggesting you "mimic" literal liver damage and anorexia to become thin, and these healthcare workers genuinely believe this is normal and okay to say. This sort of shit is what fat people experience every. single. day. This isn't even one percent of all of the oppression that fat people experience either.

The audacity to pretend fatphobia doesn't exist when this is the norm all over the planet is unfathomable.

-Mod Worthy

#ED mention #fatphobia #medical fatphobia #Mod Worthy

[cripple-council]

we really need to talk about medical fatphobia more in the physical disability community because some physdis skinny ppl are on thin fucking ice.

#cripple punk #crip punk #cripplepunk #physical disability #physically disabled #c punk #cpunk #medical fatphobia

[enbywerewolf]

I just never put these in one post

#enby werewolf #fatphobia #cw eating disorder #medical fatphobia

[phleb0tomist]

medical weight discrimination is such a huge problem and it’s such bull. i’ve been skinny disabled and i’ve been fat disabled, and guess what. my physical health was literally better when i was 200 lbs, I had the most muscle in my life, and i could move easier. I’m thin now and i do NOT feel better, i have less muscle, and i literally miss being fat. random people in your life will tell you that your chronic illness would magically leave if you lost weight. kill them

#even if losing weight WOULD fix all illnesses we still shouldn’t be making fat people feel like shit #txt #medical fatphobia #fatphobia #disabled