In a recent guest column in The Washington Post, a physician talked about his earlier misguided belief that patients who were overweight simply weren’t adjusting their lifestyle through diet and exercise to lose weight. Doing that had worked for him when he was overweight.
He admitted that this belief affected his attitude toward the patients for whom that didn’t work. He says he’s since realized that “obesity is a complex and mostly neurological and inheritable disease.”
This prejudice against “higher-weight” people is not unusual among doctors. In surveys, some 40% of doctors even admitted to having negative feelings about heavy patients. Female patients seem to be the targets of “fatphobia” by doctors more than male patients.
The reason it’s important to acknowledge and discuss this bias is because it often affects doctors’ diagnosis and treatment of their patients. Doctors with negative or at least uninformed beliefs about heavy patients are more likely to blame their weight for concerning symptoms their patients tell them about without looking further to determine what could be causing them.
Some cancers go undiagnosed until it’s too late
These beliefs can lead to dangerous failures to diagnose a serious condition until it’s too late to successfully treat. This can happen with certain types of cancer that are largely treatable in the early stages but not if they’re allowed to progress. It’s been found that higher-weight women are more likely to die from breast and cervical cancer, for example, than other women.
Another reason for this can be attributed to the fact that higher-weight people who have negative experiences with their doctors are often less likely to have regular screenings like mammograms that can help detect cancer in the early stages.
When is a doctor legally responsible?
A doctor can’t be held liable for medical malpractice if a patient fails to get check-ups and screenings as recommended. If they fail to do the same diagnostic tests they would on another patient exhibiting the same symptoms because they blame their weight, that could be a different story.
First, it’s always important to have a doctor with whom you feel comfortable and respected. However, if you believe that a failure to diagnose or delay in diagnosis – for whatever reason – has caused a condition to worsen, it’s worth determining whether you have legal recourse.
