I’ve had almost exclusively military doctors for nearly two decades, and I can tell you they aren’t trying to respect your feelings (not that they’re dicks). If your tests come back with high cholesterol, they aren’t jumping to Lipitor or some shit, they’ll refer you to a nutritionist and tell you to exercise more. They have no problems telling you that your health troubles come from that weight crushing your organs and joints.
And that’s as a person in the military, who has to maintain a certain level if fitness to keep my job.
they must harm the fat in order to save the patient
/s
The patient needs fat to live.
Have you tried not being fat?
reminder: shitpost
I’ve not not tried it
I can’t believe it took me 45 years to try that but man am I happy I did. Well, I’m almost there. None of my clothes fit anymore though.
Me: “I’ve tried everything I am physically capable of trying short of anorexia. Ive tried to walk. Ive tried lifting weights. I’ve even starved myself. 200 calories every other day for 3 months. Nothing works. I think I may have a legitimate medical issue”
Doctor: “Drink water and walk. Thatll be $250.”
Me:
200 calories every other day
Forgot to mention the 8000 calories on the alternating days but I’m sure that’s fine
Yeah, they tend to forget about those.
Mans thinks he broke the laws of conservation of mass and that’s why he’s still fat
Thermodynamics are bullshit
Nothing you said makes any sense at all
What were you eating 6000 calories every other day too? No wonder doctors don’t believe their patients.
None of that is what you should be doing. I mean yes you should be exercising. But not the way you are going about it. For context, I just lost 50 pounds, and have another 20 to go. I got a scary liver diagnosis due to a lifetime of overeating.
Download a calorie tracker and be super honest with it. At first don’t be as concerned with staying within your calories as you are about building the habit to ALWAYS log everything. Seeing it laid out has more impact than anything else in changing your daily habits. Don’t be tempted to skip little tastes, licks, and bites.
Additionally, do not starve yourself! Slowly change your habits and your body will do the rest. Starving yourself will only trigger your body into gaining weight by holding onto everything it gets. It will also make just about everyone quit within a few weeks. If you are finding yourself constantly starving (as opposed to occasionally hungry) then you need to make adjustments to what you are eating. Swap foods for better options. I swapped my late night chips, which kept me awake while driving trains at 3 am with no sleep for two days, with baby carrots I bought at the gas station. I found potatoes helpful in keeping full in the past, but had to avoid them for the liver. Potatoes aren’t super high in calories, but sour cream, bacon, cheese, and/or deep frying them is.
Remember that your body adapts to the foods you regularly eat in about 4-6 weeks. So if you start eating healthy foods you hate, like a salad with tuna and sliced beets, you will start to crave it in about a month and a half. (Tuna has fish oils and beets are chock full of antioxidants). I have hated oatmeal for 40+ years, and now that is my preferred breakfast. I tried to make myself like it over and over but this time I stuck with it long enough to actually get my body hooked on that particular set of nutrients.
Oh, and if you set your home address to Europe in My Fitness Pal, it gives you some of the premium features, like the barcode scanner.
Absolutely quit soda and energy drinks. That one is just hard and there really isn’t an easy answer for it. Sparkling water helps a bit, but really just plain water is the best at satisfying those cravings. Oh, and you will develop a massive sweet tooth when you quit soda. But if you try to stay within calories and drink a Mt Dew you will be starving by the end of the day. Diet soda is NOT better just because it doesn’t have calories. It messes with the way your body processes and stores everything else it gets making it just as bad (worse) than the regular stuff. Stevia is ok for a lot of things, but getting your tastes used to less sugar is a huge step in losing weight and getting healthier.
It’s important to notice that while an underlying medical issue is certainly likely in your situation, and that’s hard to work against… There’s no physical way you were actually ingesting 200 daily calories and didn’t lose weight.
This is beyond biology, it’s physical. You were either consuming way more than that, or you were actually losing weight and just didn’t notice. There’s no alternative.
I think the alternative is that it was a joke
It’s not funny anymore as to many think it’s a legitimate response.
I think it was a legitimate response but just exaggerated for the purposes of comedy
Huh? Joke? On the Internet? No way.
I mean they said every other day, if one day they get 200 and the next they get 5000 they ain’t losing weight…
Are they doing that or is this just a “stupid idiot is clearly just cheating” blanket retort?
Had a friend who was overweight and got into long distance running. He went from 300 lbs to a lean, mean 140. Then he injured his knee and had to give up his sport. Simple diet didn’t work, he steadily put on 100 lbs over the next two years.
Another girl I know cleans straight through 3000+ calories a day easy. Never went above 120. In fact, if she’s not housing down food she gets weak and anemic.
That’s got nothing to do with intake and everything to do with metabolism
I’m not an expert but I believe that everyone needs different intakes, depending on metabolism and activity, but if you go lower you lose weight. I went through a diet where the only thing I did was count the calories, and it worked really well.
This is like vaccine skepticism.
Fat people are fat because they eat too much.
If Bob has a “slow metabolism”, then Bob should stop eating desert after dinner if he doesn’t want to be fat.
Fat people are fat because they eat too much.
You can have the same diet your entire life and fluctuate in weight significantly.
If Bob has a “slow metabolism”, then Bob should stop eating desert
Anything else? Breakfast, lunch, and dinner? Is your singular goal your weight or do you have any other considerations?
I’m not sure what you’re getting at with the diet question. That neither invalidates nor supports what I said.
If someone wants to be fat, they can be fat. I don’t care what other people do with their lives. I’m just pointing out that the reason why a person becomes fat is well-known, proven science. Denying that is akin to vaccine skepticism; it’s actively harmful to society. The past 8 years are a great example of what happens when we allow misinformation and pseudoscience to propagate, even if it seems silly/fringe/nobody-actually-believes-that.
If someone wants to be fat, they can be fat.
This isn’t a binary choice.
Denying that is akin to vaccine skepticism
Fad diets are the height of pseudo-science and routinely harm their practitioners.
It’s not a coincidence that vaccine skeptics are regularly peddling weight lose programs and other quack remedies that don’t work. Guys like Dr Oz and RJK Jr are at the forefront of both grifts.
People “eat too much” because there’s something that’s already wrong with them that causes them to eat too much.
That may be the case, however the percentage of overweight individuals that almost certianly (as in the misreporting, not the percentage) misreport their caloric intake to their doctors is high enough that many doctors will just assume that they all lie.If they wanted to be believed they would either need actual evidence for their claims or to lose weight.
Plus, there relatively little variation between all humans in their resting metabolism. We’re talking 600 calories from the slowest metabolisms to the fastest.
i hear the metabolism also adjusts to your weight. you actually need a deficit compared to your baseline.
anedoctally though, my parner eats much less than me, but its much heavier somehow.
Completely anecdotal, but I have to assume that is incorrect, or that I have a fundamental misunderstanding. I have done tests and found that my body processes(in one hole->out another) food in about an hour. Which is absolutely insane and results in most of my evacuate being unprocessed. I’ve read that for other people in similar tests, they tend to average around 12 hours. Im guessing that means my understanding of what contitutes metabolism is incorrect?
You’re confusing solid food in my mouth with calories ingested.
If for whatever physiological reason your claim is correct, and your digestive system is indeed so fast food goes through unprocessed, you didn’t actually eat. You’ve eaten in the social, pleasurable or psychological sense, but these are not ingested calories, and therefore also completely irrelevant to your metabolism or diet.
If you could take a 1000 calorie burguer, cover it in plastic, swallow it and have it pass through intact… You just ingested zero calories. So you can’t later say “oh I regularly eat 1000 calories per meal and lose weight, but my partner chews a 300 calorie steak and gains weight!”
If you see what I mean.
Yeah, unfortunately this kinda only goes one way. No matter your metabolism, if you starve yourself you will lose weight. It’s literally physically impossible for you to not. It’s just difficult and wildly unhealthy to lose weight that way.
Whereas the opposite is not neccassarily true, depending on your metabolism you very well might be able to eat as nuch as you want. You might even have to eat more than you are comfortable with just to maintain your weight, which is what I deal with. With the right metabolism, there could be a situation where there is no upper limit on how much you could eat without gaining weight.
Caveats include: obviously if you eat a pound of food your weight goes up by a pound, but assuming you are similar to me, after that passes through you your weight goes back down to effectively the exact same as it was before you ate. Im not glorifying a fast metabolism here, in fact my metabolism is no fast that I don’t get most of the nutients i eat and am therefore perpetually malnourished no matter what or how much I eat. I spend more on food to maintain my weight than i do on literally everything else combined, excluding rent, and maybe gas.
Oddly, although scaling my food does not seem to scale nutrients from my food, scaling my caloric burn does seem to impact my appetite. When I was working a physical job, i was consuming about 4000 calories/day and most of the time i felt like I was on the edge of passing out from never ending fatigue. I’d wake up and spend every moment of the day starving. Now, i work a very relaxed job and my appetite has vanished. I often go days without eating and dont seem to be losing a significant amount of weight, unlike back when. Although when I do eat I tend to eat multiple huge meals in a day, often about once/twice a week, and my weight afterwards doesnt seem to go up, it just stops going down for a day or two. The only way for me to gain weight seems to be to lose it first, I literally cannot get above 160lb at 6"2’
You would be stufied because it’s impressive that your body can just grab calories out of thin air. Obese people lie about what they eat, it’s really simple. That’s why doctors don’t take these people serios.
the thing is, people SEVERELY underestimate how many calories are in what they’re eating. Ask any fat how much calories a chocolate bar has, and they’ll say something like “50?”
This. 200 calories is not very much food. That’s like 1 tablespoon of peanut butter, a little over 1 banana, a little less than 3 eggs, about 30 individual almonds, or little over half an avocado.
A single Hershey’s chocolate bar, mountain dew, or the smallest size of my favorite star bucks drinks are all over 200 calories too.
What part of the Hippocratic Oath does this refer to? If anything, the Oath specifies “us[ing] those dietary regimens which will benefit my patients according to my greatest ability and judgment”.
This is a joke, in a community for jokes.
I heard Dr Mike saying the other day how we a doctor, prescription drugs suck. End of the day, they have serious risks vs benefit. But the one thing known to give you the benefit of drugs without the risk is lowering your weight. Like across the board it improves so many things. I don’t envy doctors who know what the answer is but are told they’re assholes for trying to help
I’m consistently 20-30 kilo above what was considered ideal weight for my height. It took 10 different visits to 10 different doctors to find my life-altering disease that was caused by basically a slow acting infection. 9 of them attributed my very real and severe symptoms to “well, what do you want from me, you’re a fatty fat fat and until you fix this you will be bad and miserable and actually deserve it, and did I mentioned you’re fat?”. All of them were as smug as you are right now, all of them presumably thought that they’re helping.
Now that that shit is fixed, I’m still the same weight, but weirdly enough, no symptoms and I am feeling good. Almost like my body type has nothing to do with anything.
And that’s what the meme is referring to.
it’s 100% true, I am treated as less than human because high BMI.
What harm is the doctor doing to fat people in your opinion?
There is a fat acceptance movement that says you can’t control your wight, and also the only healthy way to eat is to eat whatever you want whenever you want, and if doctors want to weigh their patients or inform them of the health risks of being overweight or not do operations where excess fat would create complications, the only possible explanation for any of that is fatphobia.
That’s not what that is.
Its more just not going out of your way to be an asshole to fat people.
No theres absolutely people who believe that shit. Same as people who believe that Trump has all the answers, Jews are the problem and flat earth. The “fat acceptance”, “body shaming” and “body positivity” movements have legitimate positive roots but have also been co-opted by people who just want their bullshit view to be right.
Take “Healthy at every size” for example. You can have excellent cardiovascular fitness, great bloodwork and your weight isnt the cause of any health maladies but at some point at a certain body fat/muscle ratio (too high or low) is going to start to reduce the probablility of that being the case and people use these edge cases to justify their opinion. Look at Eddie Hall “worlds strongest man” he weighs 355lbs and over 6 foot tall, I havent seen his bloodwork but people will hold him up as an example that you can weigh 350+ but I also bet he doesnt need a scooter to get around wallmart.
There isnt an ideology or behavior on earth that cant be taken to a toxic place.
Judging the body postivity movement (which is about much more than just fat people btw) by the vocal “extemist” people is like judging vegans/vegetarians by the evangelical ones.
If you re-read the comment that you replied to first that there is a community of people who believe absolute bullshit which you deny in your reply to their comment but then admit they do in mine by refering to them as “extremists”
Doctors not taking health complaints of people who are carrying an excess of adipose tissue is a real thing, but so are people who refuse to accept that their weight is the root cause of many of their issues and do body positivity a disservice when they do
Denying care until an arbitrary amount of weight is lost.
Maybe there’s sound science behind it, such as the procedures not having been tested on larger patients (if that’s the case why don’t they just say), but mostly it just looks like a waiting list hack.
Risk/benefit ratio.
The benefit is X the risk is Y, but the risk increases with excess weight, at some point Y exceeds X. Once the risk exceeds the benefit, it no-longer makes sense to perform the procedure.
From the patient point of view, the likelihood of a bad outcome is above the likelihood of a good outcome. They would be worse off getting the procedure; but likely they are only considering the good outcome and wishing away any bad outcome.
From the doctors point of view, they are considering both outcomes and trying to communicate to the patient that it’s not a good option for them. There is also the opportunity cost to consider, they could be helping someone else that is more likely to have a good outcome.
This. And I suspect what they’re taking about isn’t common except in very specific cases, like transplants.
If there’s a compatible kidney doner available, and it’s a choice between an obese and a non-obese adult, they’re going to give it to the person more likely to survive and make longer use of the donation, and all other things being equal that’s the non-obese person. OP will categorize this as “denying care,” but it’s really a question of saving the person who isn’t likely to die anyway from comorbidities.
People love to claim that doctors don’t take fat patients seriously and complain when they tell them to loose weight.
In the Fediverse there are also some Nutjobs who will claim that being morbidly obese isn’t unhealthy and that those doctors just don’t have a clue if they think it is unhealthy
#loose
Fat people can lose weight. Loose people… are more fun I presume.
Look, the doctor just said I needed exercise, but didn’t say it had to be boring.
Isn’t it well-known that doctors frequently dismiss health concerns with “have you tried losing weight?”
When you look at how strongly obesity correlates with everything from back- and knee pains to weakened immune response to sleep issues and cardiovascular disease…
When a severely obese person has any of the above, it’s reasonable, scientifically backed diagnosis/prescription to say “these issues will probably go away by themselves if you lose weight”. This is about treating the cause and not the symptoms: When severely obese people are heavily over-represented among those with a certain disease or problem, you can try treating the symptoms, but should expect that they return rather quickly.
Of course, there are cases where the issues come from something else, but no matter who goes to the doctor with health issues, their first response will be to try to treat the post probable cause.
This isn’t always true though, so obese people end up not receiving the care they should, because their dr couldn’t or wouldn’t see past their weight.
Because in many cases, the weight is the problem.
Being obese has so many related sicknesses. From having sleeping problems to back pain to knee pain to more serious stuff like cardiac arrests - being fat brings so many health problems.
Weight gain can turn a small thing into a bigger thing. A outpatient procedure is more likely to turn inpatient if the patient is over 300lbs.
While I have no doubt there are doctors like that, they are the exception.
Every profession has it’s idiots…
First I’m ever hearing about it.
Now we have weight loss drugs, though. Those are apparently unbelievably effective
They are, and they absolutely changed my life. I was never obese, but almost always overweight since childhood.
As an adult, I used Saxenda (liraglutide) for almost 3 years prescribed by my gastro doc, lost 20 kgs with it, out of which only 3 was muscle mass. I only needed half the max dose, and now they even have a newer and more effective formula.
I was afraid I would gain it back after stopping, as I was warned, but I stopped half a year ago, and I lost 10 kg more with only diet since then. And by diet I don’t mean starving myself, just switching to super healthy and natural stuff, and staying away from processes food.
Before this med, I ate too much, and even though I tried to stay away from stuff with added sugar or too much fat, it just added up. The med took away my excessive hunger, and at the beginning I just ate less, but after a few months I also changed my diet to be more fresh and healthy, and the fat just kept melting away.
Now I’m in my mid 30s, and look better then ever, and also got rid of health conditions (like minor high blood pressure) that would cause a mess later. And again, I was never obese, only overweight, so I can’t even imagine the impact this would have on dangerously obese people.
Incredible technology, I think a lot of people will take these in the future. And my case shows that it’s not true that youchave to take it forever: if you can adjust your diet and life over a period of a few years, your body will “heal” and help you to keep the fat down later.
Sort of. We have drugs that can help you lose weight, but they come with their own challenges and risks, and you still need to eat right and exercise. And even then, it’s prescribed and covered for diagnosed diabetes. If you want it to lose weight, you probably have to pay for it.
Eating right is much more difficult than people pretend it is, and exercise is simply not possible for a lot of overweight people. You might as well say “don’t be poor, and also don’t be poor.”
So when you say on top of that, “we’ve made it easier for you to lose weight with this new drug, as long as you aren’t poor,” that’s not really helpful.
Now it is also prescribed for obesity, not just diabetes. And I think very much worth it from a societal perspective, as the healthcare costs of obesity are extreme.
My parents and my fiancee have gotten on an equivalent of Ozempic specifically for weight loss and covered by insurance. It seems to be easier now than it was, because if my fiancee wasn’t covered we absolutely couldn’t afford it.
WeGovy?
Excellent question, but I have no idea. She tears the medicine labels off for some reason so I’ll ask her when she gets home and edit with more info. It’s a capsule and a tiny pill, taken morning and night respectively, if that means anything to you.
Edit: Phentermine and topiramate
exercise is simply not possible for a lot of overweight people.
I’m not fat, but that seems simply untrue unless the person is fat due to a serious disability in the first place. Maybe doing intense exercise isn’t possible, but fat people can absolutely start with small, little exercises and work their way up over months or years.
Like going to a pool if there’s is one available near them.
…if there’s [a pool] available near them.
Speaking of institutional racism…
This validated a new normal across America: When legally required to share public pools with Black children, many white families decided they’d rather not go at all. Closing public pools to avoid racial integration became official policy for many cities across the U.S.
Not only did racism deprive black people of access to pools (leading to stereotypes like “black people don’t swim” etc.), it also greatly reduced it for white people, especially ones not wealthy enough to pay for membership to one of the private pools that sprang up in the wake of the closures of the public pools.
We are all sicker because of the bigots’ hate.
I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Obesity is almost always caused by other medical conditions, not the other way around.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ In the sample size of the few fat people I know IRL and their family’s that’s not true, at least for the people I know. Unless we’re counting mental illness as a medical condition, which is fair because they are.
Mental illnesses are absolutely medical conditions. Many of them have physical origins; your brain is a physical organ in your body. Mental illnesses with social or experiential origins are also medical conditions that can demand both physical and mental care. The brain can have a physical impact on the body that also need care. Your brain is the main organ in your body that predicts what will happen in the future, and other parts of your body respond to it to regulate biological functions, as famously demonstrated by Pavlov’s experiments with conditioning dogs by experience to get a response from their digestive (salivary) glands.
You’re right, of course, it’s not impossible, but as someone who’s had several significant changes in BMI/body fat in my life, I can tell you exercising when you’re already in decent shape is SO much easier.
Being fat makes a lot of potential options for exercise much more difficult if not outright impossible. One of the biggest ways to stay active is to find something you actually like doing, so the fewer options you have, the harder it is.
I wasn’t going to get into it, but I think you’ll find disability is far more widespread than you think it is, and the other limiting factor is poverty. Obese people skew poor for the first time in history, and it’s because the working poor are limited in food choice, healthcare, and disposable time. People who say “start small and work your way up over months or years” never worked 80 hours a week for minimum wage and it shows.
I’d there’s one thing I’ve learned in all my studies, it’s that weight los drugs are shiiiiiit
Not because they don’t work, but because a general effect like “weight loss” usually comes with more than a few downsides
One of the biggest problems with the GLP-1’s (Ozempic, etc) is the fact that people lose weight by just not eating as much, and the things they do eat aren’t likely to be very nutritious. Protein malnutrition and muscle wasting are very common sources of weight loss on Ozempic. That’s why it’s standard of care to get your patient to a licensed dietician before starting them on one of those drugs if at all possible.
Friend of mine has been on wegovy and has lost almost 40 pounds in 4-5 months. It was almost discouraging to hear that as it has taken me two years to set the correct habits to lose almost 35 pounds (and keep it off).
The side effects of those drugs are real though. My friend says she constantly feels nausea and it’s weird to see her eat so little… When we go out I would be surprised if she even eats half her plate, if that.
It’s been a long journey for me personally to lose weight. I had to teach myself how to use gym equipment, cut out all sodas, and to suppress my cravings. To see people take what looks like “the easy way out” can sting… but in the end, I feel better then ever.
And unbelievably expensive, and unbelievably good at regulating an A1C.
Now if you excuse me, I am gonna go and break down crying to the insurance rep about how Ozempic is way better than metformin at not making me shit my pants. I swear I am not making excuses just to lose weight. (Please someone, stop the madness, if I can get semiglutides that doesn’t make you lose weight but regulates my A1C I would be so happy)
quality rage bait 👏👏👏
I’m not rage baiting, its a shitpost, in the community for shitposts.
You sound distressed, you should lose some weight.
shoutout to my current PCP for actually listening to my symptoms and (most importantly) when they started/worsened and treating them and/or the cause while also reminding me I still need to keep working on my weight
gonna miss her when I move towns :[
Doctors will be the first AI replacement
Not even close.
no, but they might use it soon.
Probably the last one to be honest.
Last one is AI programmers
I can’t blame doctors for letting obesity color their opinion. Look around your doctor’s waiting room. Everyone is fat. Imagine the suffering and illness they see daily due to fat. How can those observations not color their general attitude?
Look around your doctor’s waiting room. Everyone is fat.
Lots of people are old and age correlates with weight gain. But the volleyball player who blew out her ACL isn’t fat. Neither is the chem patient who is back for a final round.
How can those observations not color their general attitude?
Doctor: “Feels like everyone I see is either sick or injured”
Nurse: “Try spending less time in the ER”
I’m not sure your second point works, or maybe I just don’t understand it. It’s not like the doctor is making judgements that people are fat outside a hospital- they’re doing their job. You’ve got a car and it’s starter goes out every year, last time being a year ago. Your car wont start. Whats the first assumption?
It’s not ableist or bias to assume that the most common issue is the most likely issue. They see a ton of people whos problems are irrefutably due to their weight. It’s not the doctors job to make judgement calls on whether that person is wholly responsible for their situation, it’s their job to doagnose the problem and help take steps to fix it. The problem being their weight, the steps include: burn down capitalism and replace it with a system that doesnt incentivise companies to use the cheapest least healthy ingredients, or tell the patient unless they lose weight they’re going to die. One of these is completely pointless to tell the patient, the other gives them an unfair opportunity to potentially save themselves.
They see a ton of people whos problems are irrefutably due to their weight.
Weight is a symptom not a cause. Metabolism, age, injury, psychology - these are causes.
burn down capitalism and replace it with a system that doesnt incentivise companies to use the cheapest least healthy ingredients, or tell the patient unless they lose weight they’re going to die.
Everyone dies. And big people have existed far longer than the advent of processed sugar. But asking people to adopt unhealthy eating habits in pursuit of a tiny waistline isn’t healthy.
Too often I see people conflating “Looking healthy” with “looking pretty”, absent any of the trade offs necessary to maintain appearances.
Weight can cause plenty of issues, it’s both a symptom and a cause.
Medical care for obesity is currently in most cases like telling someone with a broken starter that they need to run their car more instead of replacing the starter.
If eating too much compared to energy usage is unhealthy then there’s already something wrong with the patient that’s causing them to eat too much or expend too little energy. Telling them to lose weight might be the only thing within a provider’s abilities to do, but it’s equivalent to telling someone with a broken starter to leave the engine running.
It is abelist and biased to pass judgement on ones patients for having symptoms of physical, mental, social, or environmental ailments. When a symptom is already socially stigmatized a provider has a responsibility to care for the social impacts of that stigmatization as well, at the bare minimum in one’s own dealings with the patient.
Your first two paragraphs i agree with 100%. Your final paragraph i feel is accurate but id want to really mull over that before I really form an opinion. Obv in an ideal world it’s pretty easy to assign blame, but our legal and cultural issues are so fucked that topics like that really have to be analyzed in depth under the lens of how that would actually effect reality.
analyzed in depth under the lens of how that would actually effect reality
You are implying you imagine some moral hazard where their provider minimizes the risk of the conditions the patient has, and as a result the patient stops seeking treatment. What you’re talking about in reality is shame. “Should a patient feel shame talking to their provider”?, and the answer to that is resoundingly “no”. Shame is a powerful demotivator, it’s function is to stop a person from doing something that threatens their relationships with others or the society they depend on. Trying to motivate someone with shame is counter-productive. All shame in a patient care setting can do is demotivate the patient from seeking care.
Nah, the moral hazard is from the doctors side. What can a doctor get away with without risking them losing their job or putting themselves in a dangerous position.
Sorry, “moral hazard” is a term-of-art (something that doesn’t mean what it says on its face but is used in some particular way in some fields or professions). In this case by “moral hazard” I meant the idea that if you reduce the harm of some course of action there’s a chance that people will engage in it more because it’s less harmful now. It usually is applied to risky-yet-beneficial behaviours like injury from sports or from outdoor pursuits. It’s ridiculous in that context (I don’t think we should make things worse just so they don’t get better) and doubly or triply ridiculous when the risky behaviour isn’t beneficial or also isn’t effectively voluntary.
Lots of people are old and age correlates with weight gain.
Only in the US and countries with similar shitty feeding habits.
Only in the US
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and-overweight
Not actually true.
That didn’t address any link with age.
Everyone is fat
Exactly, which points squarely at an environmental cause, not at individual sloth/gluttony or some shit like that.
The conclusion you’re saying doctors arrive at—which I don’t doubt you’re correct about—is actually completely fucking backwards.
which points squarely at an environmental cause
No, it points to people eating processed food and other shit. Guess what, you can still be healthy if you eat healthy.
That’s the cause I think they were referring to.
deleted by creator
So then the question becomes, why is processed food and other shit so pervasive in the average American diet? That’s what an environmental factor is.
Refusing to think about the problem in terms of systems because you’ve got a hard-on for blaming individuals is absolutely missing the point.
You are 100% correct that we as a society have a problem with this
That’s why the individual has to take extra care to eat right and excersise. Their doctor needs to emphasize this as much as possible.
VCan we fix out society? I don’t know, I sure hope so. But in the meantime people are responsible for their own health.
Eating health is a responsibility of an individual.
Trying to blame the omnious evil system instead of the responsibility of each individual is absolutely missing the point.
Then why are Americans so much worse at it, on average, than people in e.g. France or Japan. You can’t just say “hurt durr Americans are just irresponsible;” that’s a bullshit cop-out and you know it.
I’m trying to have a conversation about what it would take to actually solving the problem here; if you just want to feel morally superior you can go ahead and fuck off.
Oh, and by the way: even if the problem really were that Americans were more irresponsible on average compared to people from other countries, there would have to be a systemic reason why and that’s the thing that would be relevant to talk about! Your thought-terminating cliche is completely fucking worthless.
You can’t just say “hurt durr Americans are just irresponsible;”
Actually, I can. That’s why americans are more obese and have more credit card debt - it all boils down to irresponsibility.
I’m trying to have a conversation about what it would take to actually solving the problem here
Solving the problem would be rather simple, subsidize healthy food so a cucumber doesn’t cost 6$. Make mandatory cooking classes in school so kids know how to cook, at least to some extent. The magical word is “education”.
even if the problem really were that Americans were more irresponsible on average compared to people from other countries
There is no “if”. They are.
there would have to be a systemic reason why
No. It boils down to people eating shitty food and not knowing/having no interest in knowing how to cook.
Like, we can argue all day about american processed food being full of additives and sugar and high fructose corn sirup etc, which is certainly the case, but at the end of the day, the people who eat it know that this is the case, so they are irresponsible, and if they don’t, it once again boils down to education.
That’s the trick!
They believe everyone is gluttonous and slothful because they’re misanthropic.
Yeah but your doctor cant prescribe you burning down capitalism, they can prescribe you lower your caloric intake.
Yeah but your doctor cant prescribe you burning down capitalism
Unless…
“Actually officer I have a prescription”
Or a mentally troubled patient. Or a black patient. Or a woman.
If you say so
Yeah. I’ve a friend who kept getting dismissed by the doctors when they came with worries about their heart, because they were diagnosed with generalised anxiety. Apparently if you’re living with anxiety you’re also immune to heart problems!
Doesn’t help that someone close to them died because of late medical intervention, which only happened because the person’s partner insisted that they fake a fainting episode as the medical system had repeatedly dismissed them when previously asking for help with their problem. Everything was fine and dandy until they didn’t pass out, then oops, too late to treat the cancer, have a nice rest of your life.
Can’t even blame individual doctors though, I think it has a lot to do with understaffing and overworking. The people who matter aren’t cared for and thus can’t properly care for the people they are obliged to care for. It all serves the bottom line of the elite because they can pocket more money.
Or lgbtq
