This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter! If you appreciate the content here, please consider supporting the newsletter by subscribing and/or sharing! This is a question that is asked in an article in Medscape by Becky McCall (as per my policy against giving traffic to weight stigma, I’m not linking to it.) It begins:
That quote from Rubino is almost hilarious. "How can we call it a disease if it doesn't fit any of the criteria for how we define disease?" And instead of going "wow - when I think about it like that, maybe it's not a disease?" his takeaway is "Clearly we just need a different name to call it. Problem solved!"
It would be laughable if that kind of thinking weren't so harmful to so many people.
I don't think it matters what name they decide on. So long as the group being labeled is stigmatized, the term will become a slur. See: retarded, queer, and autistic. And apparently diabetic.
Terms matter, but attitudes matter more. It's telling that people are looking for an even-more-gross word or acronym to replace one corrupted by stigma.
Setting aside how awful BMI is, most sources are going to define obesity as a BMI of whatever cutoff is arbitrarily deemed acceptable. My immediate reaction to this is to wonder if they're merely trying to find a new term so they can lower the cutoff for whoever qualifies for whatever intervention they specialize in so they can foist that intervention on people in the name of curing their disease. Especially if whatever name they come up with happens to be vague and broadly applicable.
If they're so determined that being fat is a disease, at what point is the cure worse than the disease?
Exactly right! When you look at how harmful most of the interventions are (or what the potential for harm is), it's hard to believe that any of those "treatments" are worth it.
Just as a note, some journals require authors to use wording like "persons with obesity," so it's not always the authors themselves choosing to use the so-called "person first" language. Not defending this one way or the other, but just that a journal may require this.
That quote from Rubino is almost hilarious. "How can we call it a disease if it doesn't fit any of the criteria for how we define disease?" And instead of going "wow - when I think about it like that, maybe it's not a disease?" his takeaway is "Clearly we just need a different name to call it. Problem solved!"
It would be laughable if that kind of thinking weren't so harmful to so many people.
I don't think it matters what name they decide on. So long as the group being labeled is stigmatized, the term will become a slur. See: retarded, queer, and autistic. And apparently diabetic.
Terms matter, but attitudes matter more. It's telling that people are looking for an even-more-gross word or acronym to replace one corrupted by stigma.
I'm fat. Call me fat.
Setting aside how awful BMI is, most sources are going to define obesity as a BMI of whatever cutoff is arbitrarily deemed acceptable. My immediate reaction to this is to wonder if they're merely trying to find a new term so they can lower the cutoff for whoever qualifies for whatever intervention they specialize in so they can foist that intervention on people in the name of curing their disease. Especially if whatever name they come up with happens to be vague and broadly applicable.
If they're so determined that being fat is a disease, at what point is the cure worse than the disease?
Exactly right! When you look at how harmful most of the interventions are (or what the potential for harm is), it's hard to believe that any of those "treatments" are worth it.
Just as a note, some journals require authors to use wording like "persons with obesity," so it's not always the authors themselves choosing to use the so-called "person first" language. Not defending this one way or the other, but just that a journal may require this.
That's a fair point.