Controversial ‘Weight Bias’ Could Lead to Preventable Hospital Mistakes

According to the statistics included in XOJane.com’s Why Fat-Shaming Really, Really Matters, as many as 440,000 patients treated in American hospitals each year experience some sort of preventable hospital mistake – a large portion of which resulted in severe and problematic health repercussions. And, as the article pointed out, many of these victims can attribute their misdiagnosis to a very real, very dangerous medically elitist trend known as “fat shaming,” or – said another way – the automatic presumption by many general practitioners that an overweight or obese patient presenting with a certain set of symptoms should first and foremost aim to slim down, and the rest should fall into place.

Sadly, as the article points out, this reaction has lead to the misdiagnosis of conditions from asthma to fibromyalgia to massive malignant tumors – all of which were initially considered to be a pathetic side effect of laziness or self-indulgence: two characteristics blindly associated with obesity. However, fat shaming and weight bias is considered an increasingly deadly form of prejudice linked with up to half of all preventable hospital mistakes around the U.S. in recent years.

Problems caused by caustic fat shaming

When a patient presents at her general practitioner with symptoms of pain, discomfort or shortness of breath; and that patient is the 33^rd individual seen by that doctor in the span of one day; and that patient is 60 pounds overweight, chances are good that the doctor will immediately take note of the patient’s large body frame and automatically assume excess weight is to blame. However, consider the following scenarios highlighting how and why weight bias can lead to seriously disastrous consequences for the overweight patient:

• Sudden weight loss in an overweight patient is often praised, when a severe underlying gastrointestinal or thyroid issue could be to blame;
• Growth of a mass – with associated pain or discomfort – in the abdomen of an overweight patient will often go undiagnosed for much longer than in a patient with a thinner frame;
• Lingering, debilitating pain in an overweight patient is often met with “frank” discussions about the need for increased exercise and physical activity, when all the while the patient is struggling with a condition like Lupus or fibromyalgia
• Difficulty breathing by an overweight patient is just as easily attributed to a presumed sedentary lifestyle as opposed to asthma or lung cancer – thereby unnecessarily delaying treatment for these potentially deadly conditions;

As the above scenarios point out, the epidemic of weight bias in the medical community could quickly turn the tides in the life of an unsuspecting patient seeking answers; one who could have defeated her condition if the same blood tests and diagnostic tools offered to thin patients had been offered to her at the outset.

To put the problem of preventable hospital mistakes in context, as compared with heart disease and cancer, this epidemic is considered the third leading cause of death in American adults – a statistic majorly in need of a drastic slim-down.

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