It's not your weight, it's the stereotype: Overweight patients get poorer medical assistance

Early on Thursday, women and men on the heavier side of the weighing scale got a reason to breathe a sigh of relief. Contrary to what you might immediately assume, no! It was not because they started eating the first cupcake of their day, but because new research suggests that those who are slightly overweight tend to live longer. Amen!Collectively as a ‘fat population’, we would be swimming in money if we got a nickel for each time someone attributed something random as a broken toe or humid weather to our waistline and gave us unsolicited directions to the nearest gym. Quartz reported the ‘obesity paradox', where researchers noticed that patients with chronic conditions like heart disease did better than the others. Why? The common factor seemed to be that they were fat, as in overweight or mildly obese. Carl Lavie, a cardiologist in Jefferson, Louisiana, was one of the first clinicians to describe the paradox.[caption id="attachment_2312192" align="alignleft" width="380"] Representational image. AFP[/caption]We have a dedicated researcher, Katherine Flegal, to thank for her extensive interest in the topic; she incorporated data from over 100 studies and close to 3 million people, as reported by Quartz. She claims that the lowest mortality rates are among the people in the overweight to mildly obese categories; a clear link between mortality and disease emerges only among people belonging to the highest end of the obesity spectrum.SheKnows, in a similar report, reported that a French endocrinologist, Boris Hansel looked at 54000 patients who were at risk of heart attacks and found that the excessive fat protected them from those very risks.Unfortunately, we belong to times where physical imperfections, as in real bodies are not very palatable to our eyes. We have become passive consumers of photo-shopped bodies and snippets about movie stars and their ‘fab abs’. That aside, the healthcare we have access to also marginalizes overweight people; mostly when such people go to doctors to get help for their ailments they are asked to reduce their weight, as if that bit alone will make the ailment go away. This could be valid diagnosis in many individual cases, but a lot of prognosis is arrived at after a superficial judgement of a person’s body mass index.CNN reported over 5 years ago that women who are ten kilos overweight tend to get poorer medical treatment. Fat discrimination is definitely a big part of the problem. The website quoted Harvard Medical School professor Dr Jerome Groopman, M.D, “"It's called attribution, because your thinking is colored by a stereotype and you attribute the entire clinical picture to that stereo¬type. Because obesity can cause so many health problems, it's very easy to blame a variety of complaints, from knee pain to breathing troubles, on a patient's weight. That's why doctors and patients need to constantly ask, 'What else could this be?'”So you ask, “can I chuck those trainers and grab that cupcake?”, definitely not, just maintain a healthy diet and do regular exercise. This revelation only means that doctors should be more vigilant about attributing a clinical picture into a stereotype and reconsider their excessive eagerness to dump all medical problems onto one cause — your weight. Perhaps we need to stop equating thinness with good health and fatness with ill health.