This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter. If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing! Weight Stigma impacts fat people’s healthcare at every level. Let’s start with what weight stigma is with, as always, a reminder that I am not in charge of defining things for all of fat-kind, this is just how I think about it. Also, a reminder that weight stigma is rooted in, and inextricable from, racism and anti-Blackness, and I urge you to read
The doctor's office where my son and I go does have roomier seating options in the waiting area. What appalls me is the fact that disabled people are expected to get up on the examination table. I'm able to walk, but hoisting myself up on the exam table is no small feat. I find this ridiculous. What do they do for people who are literally unable to walk? I thought that disability laws in the US insured workable accommodations for disabled patients.
The distinction between intrinsic and internalized is valuable. I want to expand on the example for internalized because I think it can is nuanced. The idea here isn’t just that a fat person is aware that the medical system often doesn’t have equipment and resources that fit fat bodies but that this is ok. This is ok to fat people with internalized weight stigma because they believe their bodies are the problem and shouldn’t be accommodated rather than seeing the problem as the lack of appropriate healthcare for bodies of all sizes.
I'm a content-producer for medical education (not a clinician.) Anyway, I was editing a lecture and the doctor puts up a slide "I expect to see what's on the left ("regular"-size body), but I often get what's on the right (fat body), amirite?" He makes a joke another panelist about fat people in the midwest, then proceeds to the next slide with absolutely no medically necessary reason to even include that slide. He wanted to take school-yard dig at fat people with his friends. Since I had the power to do so, I cut that slide and comments entirely. Doctors are reinforcing this bias when they think they're in the quiet enclave of medical education. Not on my watch.
So, so frustrating!! But grateful for your excellent explanations of it in its many forms. I've been fortunate to find HAES-affirming docs. Wishing everyone the same good fortune!
The doctor's office where my son and I go does have roomier seating options in the waiting area. What appalls me is the fact that disabled people are expected to get up on the examination table. I'm able to walk, but hoisting myself up on the exam table is no small feat. I find this ridiculous. What do they do for people who are literally unable to walk? I thought that disability laws in the US insured workable accommodations for disabled patients.
The distinction between intrinsic and internalized is valuable. I want to expand on the example for internalized because I think it can is nuanced. The idea here isn’t just that a fat person is aware that the medical system often doesn’t have equipment and resources that fit fat bodies but that this is ok. This is ok to fat people with internalized weight stigma because they believe their bodies are the problem and shouldn’t be accommodated rather than seeing the problem as the lack of appropriate healthcare for bodies of all sizes.
I'm a content-producer for medical education (not a clinician.) Anyway, I was editing a lecture and the doctor puts up a slide "I expect to see what's on the left ("regular"-size body), but I often get what's on the right (fat body), amirite?" He makes a joke another panelist about fat people in the midwest, then proceeds to the next slide with absolutely no medically necessary reason to even include that slide. He wanted to take school-yard dig at fat people with his friends. Since I had the power to do so, I cut that slide and comments entirely. Doctors are reinforcing this bias when they think they're in the quiet enclave of medical education. Not on my watch.
So, so frustrating!! But grateful for your excellent explanations of it in its many forms. I've been fortunate to find HAES-affirming docs. Wishing everyone the same good fortune!