Does your doctor respect you if you're fat?

October 25, 8:59 PMSF Fitness ExaminerJim Evans

Previous Next

1 comment Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the SF Fitness Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

What does he really think?
Microsoft Office

Your doctor’s friendly façade might mask his true attitude about you if you are overweight or obese according to a new study by researchers at Johns Hopkins, suggesting that it might even have an adverse affect on your long-term health. 

The new study  to be published in the November edition of Journal of General Internal Medicine (http://www.wiley.com/bw/journal.asp?ref=0884-8734) found that physicians had lower respect for patients with a higher than normal Body Mass Index (BMI), the standard for determining healthy weight based on a person’s height and weight.

According to Mary Margaret Huizinga (http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/gim/faculty/Huizinga.html), assistant professor of general internal medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, “Many patients (in the study) felt like because they were overweight, they weren’t receiving the type of care other patients received.” 

Huizinga, who is also the study’s leader and director of the Johns Hopkins Digestive Weight Loss Center, said further that patients would come in and “by the end of the visit would be in tears, saying no other physician talked with me like this before. No one listened to me.” 

Other studies have previously indicated that patients receive more information from their doctors when the doctors respect them. Conversely, some patients who do not fee respected may be inclined to avoid the health care system completely.

How does this affect patient care?   “The next step is to really understand how physician attitudes toward obesity affect quality of care for those patients, to really understand how this affects outcomes,” says Huizinga. “If a doctor has a patient with obesity and has low respect for that person, is the doctor less likely to recommend certain types of weight loss programs or to send her for cancer screening? We need to understand these things better.”

Ultimately, she says, physicians need to be educated that obesity bias and discrimination exist. One good place to start would be in medical school, she says, where little is taught to reduce or compensate for these negative attitudes. “Awareness of their own biases can lead to an alteration of behavior and sensitivity that they need to watch how they act toward patients.”