Discussion about this post

User's avatar
C MN's avatar

Just a shower thought: do studies ever account for the difficulty fat people had accessing health insurance prior to the ACA? I hear a lot about how fat people often arrive at the doctor with a later progression of a disease because they've avoided the doctor for fear of stigma, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone point out that, until recently, a fat person may have had greater difficulty in affording healthcare.

Expand full comment
Rhiannon's avatar

My OBGYN used BMI to assess my health while pregnant. At 34 weeks, I’d gained enough weight to creep into the ob*se category, so I suddenly got the whole list of warnings of potential labour and delivery complications despite none of the other indicators of these things being present. I was so mad that he tried to scare me about my size: at that point of the pregnancy, the baby is mostly developed and just needs to get bigger, so the birth parent is just going to keep gaining weight. This was nearly ten years ago and I’m still salty about it; it was the first time I’d really experienced someone being fixated on the number on the scale rather any of the symptoms that I was or wasn’t presenting with.

Expand full comment
10 more comments...

No posts