Your Fat Friend: How Health Care Bias Harms Fat Patients
Selected Excerpts
“For so long, bodies like mine have been called an epidemic, a threatening sickness tearing through the population like a wildfire through a countryside. … But in these responses, in this research, a new epidemic emerges. This time, the epidemic isn’t our untamed bodies, but a distant lack of curiosity from health care providers.”
“I pushed myself to imagine a world in which all of us could trust our doctors. I tried to imagine my body being greeted as anything other than a failure. I tried to imagine a doctor uncoupling my appearance from my character—one who’s willing to see me as a good person, a determined and strong person, and also a fat person. I struggle to dream up a world in which my body isn’t written off as a death sentence for some original sin, an albatross that marks me with every health care provider.
Still, it feels so impossible. Still, it is so desperately far away.”
Discussion Questions
Your Fat Friend's essay offers stories and insight into the misdiagnosis and harm fat people can face within healthcare. How did reading it make you feel? What did you reflect on?
Your Fat Friend moves discussion of the "obesity epidemic" beyond fat people’s "untamed bodies" to healthcare provider bias. What effect does this reframing have? What role do healthcare providers play in a fatphobic society? How can healthcare challenge this bias?
What can this essay teach us about the experience of being a fat person in healthcare? What would healthcare experiences that foster trust and connection, not disdain or bias, look like? How can we all help create such a world?
Reflections from #MedHumChat
“Makes me angry. I have had many pts internalize this bias. One patient blames her own symptoms on her weight, when I don't think weight explains them. I realize that's how medicine has probably always treated her.”—@colleenmfarrell
“Reading this piece made me deeply, deeply sad. Your Fat Friend is a talented writer who did an amazing job capturing the horror of the realization that this happens so much, the powerlessness of it. It makes me want to grieve for all the people who have been lost bc of this.”—@JaneDoeFutureMD
“This "lack of curiosity" makes me think of "satisfaction of search" errors in radiology. When we find something to blame we tend to stop searching. When dealing with illnesses, I guess we have to keep looking and not just immediately blame obesity.”—@brianchiong
“I hope we’ll all learn to look beyond first impressions, to get to know someone and their story, to think critically about evidence and societal messages. For me especially, I wish people saw the trauma that is behind my weight.—@Gina_Nicoll
About this #MedHumChat
“How Health Care Bias Harms Fat Patients” by anonymous under the pseudonym “Your Fat Friend” was paired with the essay “On being a fat medical student, at the start of our metabolism module” by Isabelle Lomax-Sawyers for a #MedHumChat discussion February 5, 2020 exploring Weight Bias in Medicine.
We were honored to be joined by special guest Isabelle Lomax-Sawyers (@izzylomax), a medical student at the University of Otago in New Zealand and author of this piece.
The pieces for this chat, along with the discussion questions, were selected by Gina Nicoll.
About the Author
Your Fat Friend (@yrfatfriend) writes anonymously about the social realities of life as a very fat person, specifically health, weight stigma, and fatness. You can learn more about their work here.