This is just . . . weird

[pegkerr]

Doctor in trouble for calling woman obese.

The story doesn't say exactly how he phrased what he said to her. I gotta think there is more to the story here.

It makes me think of that term Berke Breathed coined: "Offensensitivity."

Comments

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

What struck me about the article is that the doctor baldly said her weight would "kill" her, which is really bad medical practice. Most fo the time, when your life is at stake, you can't get a straight answer from a doctor about whether the cancer, say, will certainly kill you, or when. And there's a good reason for that: the doctor can't know such things with any certainty, and it is both unscientific and unethical to pretend to certainty they don't have. When you think about that, a doctor saying, "your weight will kill you" is almost hard to believe--except I know how many people feel that any kind of unethical treatment, including outright abuse, is justified if it might make a fat person lose weight. So I believe it, but I think the woman was right to report him to the medical board. Not for saying she's obese, but for making a pronouncement of death that could not possibly have been medically justified.