Doctors dismissed her, but she turned out to be right after years of needless suffering

[conuly]

Surprise, surprise, she was overweight, therefore, various doctors insisted the answer to all her problems was to lose weight.

There's a million more patients with stories just like this. Whenever you hear somebody confidently and disdainfully assert that you can't be healthy if you're overweight because "it's just facts" that "science proves" that being overweight increases your risk of serious illness leading to death, ask yourself if that person has adequately accounted for medical bias.

I'm not saying that being overweight isn't a risk factor for early death - but how big is it really? The answer is unknowable until we weed out this sort of nonsense from medicine.

Comments

[shadowkat]

I had doctor's tell me the same thing, and a co-worker was told it. It's an easy answer.
And it annoys me. "Eat Less and Exercise More" without bothering to ask the patient what they are eating, what their diet is, and how they are exercising and their limits.

The difficulty is they overbook themselves to make money. The more patients they see - the more money they make. So as a result they only really have a limited time with the patient. Add to that - they spend 90% of it typing or having someone else type things in a computer. I find myself speaking a mile a minute whenever I see a doctor, and I dread it.

And too much reliance on blood tests, without digging deeper.

And there's a lot of reasons people are overweight. I eat a lot of salads, I take long walks, I really don't eat that much, and I'm overweight. And I have a college friend who is eating healthy, but because of massive injury and the inability to exercise regularly, and various gut issues - ended up weighing over 340 pounds. She's now down to 213.

I think the difficulty is that we don't want to spend the money and time on healthcare, and put it above other things. We haven't figured out yet that without your health we have nothing. It's a lesson the Governor of NY figured out in March and April, and began preaching. Without equal and universal health care for everyone - we won't have Broadway, Football Games, Baseball (without massive limitiations), movies in theaters, concerts, cruises, vacations at resorts, school, etc.

I remember dating a doctor once from Shanghai, China - he told me that there was no time to treat patients in the US hospitals, maybe 15 minutes tops. While in Shanghai - you had about two hours to spend with them. Also in NYC hospitals, you often worked back to back shifts, and were sleep deprived, while in China you didn't. It had a better health care system.

[delight]

... that's my doctor! I was literally just in Dr. Seckin's office yesterday.

[sabotabby]

Does being overweight kill you earlier or is it a risk factor because if you're overweight, doctors ignore your other symptoms? (This is possibly the case with covid, where doctors refused overweight people ventilators.)

[delight]

It's actually both.

[adafrog]

It does happen at times, and it shouldn't. And I feel for her original doctor that had no idea and tried to get her to someone who could figure it out. Been there.
Still, though, how stupid do you have to be to not go ahead and check for endometriosis when the patient asks? It's not uncommon. Jerks.

[wpadmirer]

That is so frustrating.

[kengr]

Been there, done that, have the medical complications.

I gained over a hundred pounds over the course of a couple of years because I was "overweight" (hint, the doctor's suggested "ideal weight" was one that I once got close to by skipping meals while doing farm chores *and* working out as part of the high school wrestling team. In short, it was an insane idea) and the doctor *severely* misunderstood what sleep apnea was.

If he'd referred me for testing when I first suggested symptoms, I;'d be a lot lighter (and healthier) now.

Classic case of assuming obesity was the cause rather than the effect.

[rmc28]

I went to the doctor once about mysterious recent-onset fatigue and he asked if I'd considered exercising more and trying to lose weight. In fairness to him, he backtracked when I detailed how much exercise I already did, and he ordered a bunch of blood tests, but then told me they showed nothing. In the meantime I self-diagnosed possible vitamin D deficiency, supplemented, and suddenly stopped being tired all the time.

(And the capper: nine months later a different doctor looking at my historical blood tests for an entirely different reason said my vitamin D levels had been "in the range where some people benefit from supplementation". VINDICATION.)

[pipilj]

Doctors can be very dismisive especially if you are overweight. It is crazy there is so much more to health. There is muscules, BMI and stamina. My friend who is overweight can run a marathon and lift weights. I am skinny but basically a couch potato. On a lighter note my relative who was very obese who lived near a funeral home said most of the bodies in the herse were skinny.

[gingicat]

Being overweight is often a *symptom* of health problems.

[fred_mouse]

This!

Also, pretty sure that weight gain and endometriosis can be co-morbit, not least because endo can significantly muck with the hormone profile (I'd have to go and reread the studies, it has been about ten years since I did the reading).

[rebeccmeister]

A classic, horrible story about how the medical system in the U.S. fails people, and it's far worse for Black folks as well.

What is most sad to me in general is that if doctors could instead simply ask about and emphasize regular exercise, that's something that people of all shapes and sizes can do something about, and there are clear and definite benefits to regular exercise for people of all shapes and sizes. And having some level of fitness is huge for prevention. The person in this story was clearly doing a lot with regards to exercise.

And meanwhile, study after study after study has clearly shown that it is horribly difficult, if not impossible, to make safe, long-term changes to one's bodyweight.

And lastly, as noted by another commenter, it can be healthier to be overweight than underweight.

There are a couple other classic medical targets that also irritate me (see: cholesterol levels, and the excessive drugging of people so as to control them). The medical establishment is often slow to catch up on certain fronts.

[thewayne]

25 lbs is not horribly overweight. Geez.

I had a similar runaround with my pneumonias. I had pneumonia twice and a lung doctor dismissed two sets of before and after x-rays, along with two sets of radiology reports stating left lower lobe pneumonia, and two sets of bloodwork showing elevated white blood cell counts - as bronchitis. He was fired. Two days after seeing him? Pneumonia #3 struck. Not that he could have prevented it, it clearly was percolating at the moment I saw him.

Even the immunologist whom I FINALLY got in to see wanted to blame it on bronchitis. He was an environmental/industrial immunologist/allergist. My wife had to brow-beat him in to ordering an antibody test, which showed my immunoglobulin levels were all-but zero. "I guess you do have CVID!" DUH!

I can understand doctors don't like being second-guessed at their profession and probably have more than their share of hypochondriacs coming in with a list of their illnesses, all wrong. BUT SOMETIMES WE'RE RIGHT!

[conuly]

And for all that they scoff at "Dr. Google", the fact is that if you have a rare disease, you're pretty likely to have to do your own research and give yourself your own self-diagnosis before you visit a specialist, because doctors are trained not to consider rare diseases.

[thewayne]

For me, it's usual for immune disorders to be caught in childhood, so pediatricians are trained to look for them.  But 10%+ of immune compromised people are adults!  So adult doctors easily miss them and attribute them to something else, causing a lot of suffering and additional - sometimes permanent - damage!  It can take SIX YEARS for immune disorders to get correctly diagnosed in adults, fortunately it only took about four months for us to push and get it done for me. Now, in my case, my specific flavor - hypogammaglobulinemia - was only formally categorized in the 1950s.  As I was born in '61, and my condition wasn't fully manifest in my childhood - and knowing that it was highly unlikely that my pediatrician was trained in childhood immunological problems - it's not reasonable to expect that it could have been caught in my childhood.  Plus, treatment back then really sucked.  And there is no cure, just maintenance treatment.

Us CVID (Common Variable Immuno-Deficiency) people know well that we have to be our own advocates and to be pushy.  Fortunately I now have a really good immunologist.  The immunologist who first wanted to diagnose me as having had bronchitis retired.

[ex_inklessej388]

It is the same thing for smokers. There are certainly a ton of risk-factors to one's health associated with smoking but as soon as you admit to medical staff that you smoke, even occasionally, it suddenly seems like all of your medical issues are related to that vice. Knee hurts? Well, if you didn't smoke you'd be able to work out more and your joints wouldn't hurt. Heachaches? Well, smokers are at an increased risk for those. And on and on.

There is an obvious difference with smoking. No one is born genetically disposed to smoking (I think) but some people are just made bigger than others. So the weight issue in medicine certainly is frustrating. But I think the narrow vision of medical staff is not limited to just being overweight. If you do not fit the mould of what they consider healthy, that sudden becomes the focus of your issues to the exclusion of all others. That is not good medicine and probably a product of our fast-paced in and out the door experience that healthcare has become in the west.

[greghousesgf]

I went through something very similar several years ago when I was in really bad abdominal pain for a year which kept getting misdiagnosed. Turns out I had a tumor on my ovary the size of a damn melon. I'm just glad it wasn't cancer.

[bitterlawngnome]

Also, because sexism.

[silveradept]

There are so many more serious things that a person who wants to believe it's just weight (or some other simple thing) will miss. If only we didn't have a system that basically bankrupts a person to get them medical training and then insists the only way they can be profitable is to avoid thinking past the most basic of things so they can see too many people.

I feel like getting rid of the for-profitness of health care would improve outcomes drastically. And might clean a little bit of politics up, as well, by removing one sector of attempted politician-purchasing.