While the medical community in the U.S. races to treat patients for cancer and opioid addiction, one health concern is being ignored- obesity.
A recent article in the New York Times reported that health care providers do not have the appropriately sized equipment like scales and M.R.Is, and some surgeons have even refused to operate on overweight patients. These problems affect more than 15 million obese Americans. That is one out of three people in the entire country.
“It is part of the general cultural disgust about overweight and fat,” said medical ethicist Art Capan on Boston Public Radio Tuesday. “It is acceptable in the culture to really get down on obesity. We can insult all we want, but what that does is that it gets in everybody’s head including the doctors, and so pretty soon they are saying, 'well you know you’re not really a great patient, and you are not a responsible patient, and you must not care about your health because you are too fat."
Caplan says that we need to change the medical community looks at obesity. “We don’t have a health system that is responsive to this obesity crisis,” he said. Caplan suggested that doctors become more active in helping their patients attain a healthy weight by providing nutritional and exercise plans.
"I think it’s cultural and the only way we are going to get around it is basically treat being fat like a health problem that the doctor should manage, not ignore," said Caplan.
Listen to our interview with Art Caplan above.
