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

[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.