Anti-Obesity Discrimination and Obesity Treatment

I am an expert on this — Anti-overweight discrimination.

First, from my practice. I remember a woman in her forties I saw in Oklahoma for a routine antidepressant renewal who told me that she had a cardiac condition and had been to her primary physician (this is back in the prehistoric days when I took insurance) and he had told me it was her own fault she was overweight and she was risking her life by doing nothing about it.

She was not suicidal. She told me she would never see that doctor again. And she was not going to take any heart medicine.

I renewed her routine and (allegedly; at least, then I believed it) cardiac side effect free antidepressant.

I pleaded and even cried. I told her life was precious, and heart problems were dangerous.

No. “When you have been hurt you have been hurt. I am a God-fearing woman (I heard this plenty in Oklahoma) and when I join God I will join God. I am not going to another doctor.”

I tried hard, talked a lot, documented a lot, and — in what then would have been considered a creative, even wildly original move — told her to look at one of those pages with teency-tiny ID photos of the primary care doctors available in her insurance and pick the fattest one she could find.

Nothing worked. I could identify with her pain, told her I had been called “fatso for a big part of my life. Nothing worked. I left Oklahoma and have no idea if she is still alive.

The things reported in the New York Times article are far more subtle.

People are denied surgery for being overweight. Such was not the case in either France or America when I was actively performing surgery. It meant the assistant (me) threw her whole (sometimes considerable) weight into holding the retractor, to pull back whatever flesh happened to be in the way.

Maybe there are emergency procedures treated more tenderly. I don’t know any more.

I do know, from my own observations and experience, that obesity is not a person’s “fault,” it has to do with genetics and overprocessed foods.

I avoid doctors for numerous reasons, but I can tell you that before and after a weight loss of about 200 pounds I was treated first poorly then nicely in department stores and other public places.

My father of blessed memory hated people from Yale because of the primordial Harvard-Yale rivalry, but he did think anyone with a Jewish surname was smarter. I actually read this article and was outraged. (Note: this link is a PDF file and you must have the free Adobe Acrobat reader installed to read it.)

Yes, obesity is certainly a factor in all of the major causes of death in America. Unfortunately there is a belief in America that when there is a problem, you make more rules and give people more instruction so you can fix it.

Not if you do not have underlying science.

A Yale professor with a Jewish surname wants to teach people to limit portions and other things he lists to eliminate childhood obesity.

We all know how much children, and adults for that matter, love to work around the rules.

People worship the football player who gets his way without a penalty flag going down. Even a stellar example such as my husband remembers a childhood fantasy about getting beans up his nose since his grandmother of blessed memory told him not to get beans up his nose.

Even me, myself, I remember when my parents told me never to eat non-kosher seafood in Boston — lobster capital of the world — and the first time I got to buy my own lunch at Boston University, I savored a lobster roll at a hole-in-the-wall diner on Commonwealth Avenue.

The only thing I can think of right now that would give me more pleasure than that moment, would be beating up this Jewish Yale professor, which I am not stupid enough to do physically (I would end up in jail) But I am doing ideologically.

This man is simply not smart enough to question the power of his own, or any authority.

Any mother who has tried to make children eat what they do not like is smarter than him. Better at observing human behavior.

The processing of food, the poisoning of American food, is evident to anyone who observes, as I have .

Everyone except him knows diets don’t work.

Everyone in the rest of the world knows there is more obesity when American style food moves in.

He is the caricatural ivory tower academic who knows nothing of life.

America deserves better.

America deserves me, and the American Natural Health Initiative.

I have moved far beyond my academic appointments.

I need help and friends but I am the doctor who sees the truth, and helps myself and others.

Copyright 2013 Estelle Toby Goldstein, MD