More ranting on the campaign against fat people
The whole "obesity epidemic" trend is getting ridiculous. Let me give you a few examples from my work. I read maternity casenotes all day, and I've seen some interesting ones. But it never ceases to infuriate me how much some midwives fixate on a patient's weight.
I had a set of notes for a girl who had an uneventful pregnancy and an uneventful delivery. Normally, the obstetrician doesn't send a letter to the patient's GP when all goes well. This doctor sent a letter to the GP just to tell him that he needs to tell his patient to lose some weight before she gets pregnant again. She was only barely in the "obese" range. On top of that, she was 16 years old and smoked a pack of cigarettes a day. She didn't plan that pregnancy, so it's unlikely she'd be planning the next one either. And it infuriates me that they write a letter that she should lose weight, without ever mentioning that she also shouldn't be having underage sex or smoking.
The next day, I had notes for two women. The first one was about 30 pounds overweight and a heavy smoker. The second one was a cocaine addicted prostitute who drank a two bottles of vodka a week. Of all those factors, the only thing that the midwives decided to comment on over and over and mention in the GP letter was the "raised BMI" of the first woman. Because according to the Church of Kate Moss, the second woman was living the ideal lifestyle, and the first one, who dared to have body fat, was clearly going to be a worse mother than the second.
The country of New Zealand recently refused entry to a woman from America because she was overweight and "would be a drain on the healthcare system." Do they reject smokers? Do they reject heavy drinkers and drug addicts? No. But they also rejected a child with a facial deformity. Apparently New Zealand is no longer a civilized nation; it is a small island nightclub that only accepts the beautiful and the wealthy.
Recent research has shown that people who are overweight to mildly obese live 8 months longer on average, and people who are underweight live 15 months less than average. To a point, putting on weight will make you live longer. But think of all the money they're saving on pensions and social security by convincing people to be thin.
Is there really an epidemic of obesity? Possibly not. They keep changing the definition of "obese". Millions of people who were previously classed as merely "overweight" are now being categorized as "obese" without gaining an ounce. I work in medical coding, which is statistical data gathering for the World Health Organization. In the UK, they changed the rules for co-morbidity coding this year. We can only code 6 diagnoses per episode for a patient. If they have 3 or 4 immediate problems, those get coded first, and the other spaces are filled with anything else they have, like diabetes or asthma or whatever. They've moved obesity way up in the ranking, so we have to list that before we list valvular heart disease, paraplegia, kidney disease, drug abuse, or high blood pressure. So we can guarantee that there will be more patients with obesity as a co-morbidity. There aren't any more obese patients, but now we have to ignore their alcoholism and hypertention in order to make sure that we mention that they're fat.
Basically, all the paranoia about obesity is a load of crap. To quote Stephen Fry, it is "Loose stool water. Ass gravy of the worst kind." It's all just scapegoating fat people because it's no longer acceptable to discriminate against anyone else.
Alana
I had a set of notes for a girl who had an uneventful pregnancy and an uneventful delivery. Normally, the obstetrician doesn't send a letter to the patient's GP when all goes well. This doctor sent a letter to the GP just to tell him that he needs to tell his patient to lose some weight before she gets pregnant again. She was only barely in the "obese" range. On top of that, she was 16 years old and smoked a pack of cigarettes a day. She didn't plan that pregnancy, so it's unlikely she'd be planning the next one either. And it infuriates me that they write a letter that she should lose weight, without ever mentioning that she also shouldn't be having underage sex or smoking.
The next day, I had notes for two women. The first one was about 30 pounds overweight and a heavy smoker. The second one was a cocaine addicted prostitute who drank a two bottles of vodka a week. Of all those factors, the only thing that the midwives decided to comment on over and over and mention in the GP letter was the "raised BMI" of the first woman. Because according to the Church of Kate Moss, the second woman was living the ideal lifestyle, and the first one, who dared to have body fat, was clearly going to be a worse mother than the second.
The country of New Zealand recently refused entry to a woman from America because she was overweight and "would be a drain on the healthcare system." Do they reject smokers? Do they reject heavy drinkers and drug addicts? No. But they also rejected a child with a facial deformity. Apparently New Zealand is no longer a civilized nation; it is a small island nightclub that only accepts the beautiful and the wealthy.
Recent research has shown that people who are overweight to mildly obese live 8 months longer on average, and people who are underweight live 15 months less than average. To a point, putting on weight will make you live longer. But think of all the money they're saving on pensions and social security by convincing people to be thin.
Is there really an epidemic of obesity? Possibly not. They keep changing the definition of "obese". Millions of people who were previously classed as merely "overweight" are now being categorized as "obese" without gaining an ounce. I work in medical coding, which is statistical data gathering for the World Health Organization. In the UK, they changed the rules for co-morbidity coding this year. We can only code 6 diagnoses per episode for a patient. If they have 3 or 4 immediate problems, those get coded first, and the other spaces are filled with anything else they have, like diabetes or asthma or whatever. They've moved obesity way up in the ranking, so we have to list that before we list valvular heart disease, paraplegia, kidney disease, drug abuse, or high blood pressure. So we can guarantee that there will be more patients with obesity as a co-morbidity. There aren't any more obese patients, but now we have to ignore their alcoholism and hypertention in order to make sure that we mention that they're fat.
Basically, all the paranoia about obesity is a load of crap. To quote Stephen Fry, it is "Loose stool water. Ass gravy of the worst kind." It's all just scapegoating fat people because it's no longer acceptable to discriminate against anyone else.
Alana
Comments
Posted by: Matt and Jaime | January 24, 2008 07:09 PM