Why Do Obese Patients Get Worse Care? Many Doctors Don't See Past the Fat
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Re: Why Do Obese Patients Get Worse Care? Many Doctors Don't See Past the Fat
#2Coming from a family of medical doctors, medicine stands to gain a lot in terms of quality of service by increasingly automating doctors out of the loop. These people (my family members and relatives included) typically go into the profession for money and social status instead of helping patients, to the point where it borders on being exploitative.
Re: Why Do Obese Patients Get Worse Care? Many Doctors Don't See Past the Fat
#3The article starts out talking about a woman who is 502 lbs. Why wouldn't "lose weight" be the best suggestion? You're 500 lbs!
Re: Why Do Obese Patients Get Worse Care? Many Doctors Don't See Past the Fat
#4Coming from a family of medical doctors, medicine stands to gain a lot in terms of quality of service by increasingly automating doctors out of the loop. These people (my family members and relatives included) typically go into the profession for money and social status instead of helping patients, to the point where it borders on being exploitative.
Or doctors could learn to be more humane when dealing with patients? Calling for automation in this case seems to be a very software engineering centric solution to the issue.
Re: Why Do Obese Patients Get Worse Care? Many Doctors Don't See Past the Fat
#5Let me save you the time: it's an article pandering to fat people without any substance and really dishonest arguments.
The complaint is that doctors tell fat people to lose weight when they come in with symptoms that match the symptoms of being very overweight. If you go to the doctor with knee pain and you are drastically overweight, the most likely answer is that the knee pain is from being overweight. The doctor is going to tell you to lose weight. This doesn't mean they're dismissing that it might be something else, which is evident by the example in the article where the root cause was also found.
I had to stop reading at the point where the quoted a doctor as saying
>doctors and hospitals have become risk-averse because they fear their ratings will fall if too many patients have complications
followed by
>A recent survey of more than 700 hip and knee surgeons confirmed Dr. Yates’s impressions. Sixty-two percent said they used body mass index scores as cutoffs for requiring weight loss before offering surgery.
This survey doesn't confirm that surgeries are refused for the fear of lower ratings. It confirms that doctors have a BMI cuttoff for surgery. Saying that there shouldn't be a limit somewhere is beyond stupid, meaning this survey is pointless. And it's frankly tremendously disrespectful towards doctors - they have BMI cutoffs for the sake of the patient's life. The risk of complications is extremely real and doctors don't want a high risk of literally killing someone to resolve a knee pain that, while crappy, is better than dying. And they're not even asking patients to live the rest of their life with that knee pain - only long enough they can lose weight and not have such drastically dangerous odds from the surgery.
This article is garbage.
Re: Why Do Obese Patients Get Worse Care? Many Doctors Don't See Past the Fat
#6Life is hard when you have worked yourself into a health hole. Getting out will require treating a cluster of issues. Obesity is trivial to diagnose. So the rest get little attention until that one is dealt with. Occams razor says don't spend a moment more figuring out probable cause than is necessary.
Re: Why Do Obese Patients Get Worse Care? Many Doctors Don't See Past the Fat
#7To be a bit blunt, the doctors are probably thinking "if you won't take care of your body, why should I?"
If someone is so massively overweight that they need to use equipment intended for large animals or industrial scrap, they are putting themselves in an extremely precarious health situation.
Re: Why Do Obese Patients Get Worse Care? Many Doctors Don't See Past the Fat
#8Coming from a family of medical doctors, medicine stands to gain a lot in terms of quality of service by increasingly automating doctors out of the loop. These people (my family members and relatives included) typically go into the profession for money and social status instead of helping patients, to the point where it borders on being exploitative.
Or doctors could learn to be more humane when dealing with patients? Calling for automation in this case seems to be a very software engineering centric solution to the issue.
I don't even work in software, but it just makes sense considering most of what they do is looking up factoids in a textbook. They frequently misdiagnose or let things slip by because there's just no way for humans to memorize that many books.
Re: Why Do Obese Patients Get Worse Care? Many Doctors Don't See Past the Fat
#9Let me save you the time: it's an article pandering to fat people without any substance and really dishonest arguments. The complaint is that doctors tell fat people to lose weight when they come in with symptoms that match the symptoms of being very overweight. If you go to the doctor with knee pain and you are drastically overweight, the most likely answer is that the knee pain is from being overweight. The doctor…
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Re: Why Do Obese Patients Get Worse Care? Many Doctors Don't See Past the Fat
#10Coming from a family of medical doctors, medicine stands to gain a lot in terms of quality of service by increasingly automating doctors out of the loop. These people (my family members and relatives included) typically go into the profession for money and social status instead of helping patients, to the point where it borders on being exploitative.
Comments like this are incredibly uninformed and in my experience not really true. If you can get into medical school, you could do another job that is a lot less of a slog and make more money. There are slides going around somewhere where if you account for hours worked, doctors make about the same as UPS drives on average.