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Study suggests obese patients get less respect from physicians
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It turns out that the Rodney Dangerfield line about not getting any respect may apply to overweight and obese patients when talking about their relationships with their physicians.
In a study from Johns Hopkins University , it is revealed that the higher the patients' BMI, the lower the physicians' respect. The findings were released in the November 2009 issue of the Journal for General Internal Medicine.
In the 238 patient study, it was found that for every 10-unit increase in BMI there was a correlating 14 percent increase in the chance the physician would show them less respect. This calls into question whether the physicians' attitudes affect the health of the obese patient and the quality of their long-term 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 Mary Margaret Huizinga, M.D., M.P.H., an assistant professor of general internal medicine at John's Hopkins. "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."
According to Ms. Huizinga, little is taught in medical schools to try to reduce the possibility that a doctor may harbor negative attitudes toward obese patients. "Many patients felt like because they were overweight, they weren't receiving the type of care other patients received," she says.
Ms. Huizinga added that they were unable to show a correlation between low respect shown to patients by physicians and poor health outcomes. However, previous studies have shown that patients that do receive greater respect from their physicians tend to receive more information from them.
The study was performed on 238 patients and 40 physicians in 14 urban community health facilities located in and around Baltimore. Both patients and their physicians were given a questionnaire at the end of the visits. The questionnaires asked questions about the visit, attitudes, and the patient and physician perception of each other.
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