Got a lot to say but I’ll keep it brief-ish. Corporations love unhealthy people. They will artificially celebrate this and reinforce unhealthy lifestyles. This extends beyond weight.
Once entrapped, escape is hard. Some are passive and depressed. Some are dismissive and defensive. No matter which cycle you are in, it’s unhealthy.
I think smoking is bad like I think being overweight is bad. If a doctor says alcohol is killing you, it probably is. I don’t think hatred is deserved, but don’t expect any validation for those choices.
Surely no coincidence that being obese is a gateway to hyperconsumerism anyway. Sugary, fatty, processed snack foods are way more profitable than healthy meals.
Walking around town is free, can’t have that. Sit at this computer chair, watch advertisements and play video games instead.
Heart disease at 26? That’ll be $2k/month until you die.
Get depressed, buy the meds, never leave your couch, don’t fight back, you’re the evolution of humanity and - most of all - you are beautiful.
The meme isn’t about that, I’ve read stories of some doctors refusing to perform surguries to overweight people, but other doctors doing the surgery anyway.
The same way a lot of women get told stuff is just from their period by doctors.
I’m a medical student and I have some direct experience with this. Sometimes, the difference between the surgeon who will do the procedure versus the surgeon that won’t do the procedure is the availability of specialized facilities and equipment that they have access to. An elective surgery (i.e. not an emergency surgery) can go from routine to very high risk depending on the amount of adipose tissue the patient has.
And it’s not just a matter of the fat tissue overlying the surgical site. Morbidly obese patients are much more likely to have things like sleep apnea which can make anesthesia more risky and might require more specialized equipment than a particular surgeon/hospital/anesthesiologist might have access to. The “morbid” part of “morbid obesity” also refers to the fact that people above a certain threshold of weight are much more likely to have other health conditions like heart disease that make anesthesia more risky.
This is what I came to say but wasn’t smart enough to put into words. There’s a lot more factors than just being overweight of why a surgery can’t be performed. For a while an issue at my hospital was we were one of the few in the area that could do MRIs on larger patients. So bigger hospitals would transfer these patients to us just for an MRI because their MRI machine was too small or couldn’t handle the weight.
There’s a reason you have to get a pre-op physical exam for any non-emergent surgery. Figuring out if you’ll wake up from the anesthesia at all is part of the calculus that determines whether the benefits of the procedure outweigh the risks.
Sometimes. It depends why the first surgeon would be unable to do the procedure. If the problem is that the patient might not wake up from anesthesia because of problems with heart disease, lung problems, or other metabolic issues, then it doesn’t really matter what the surgeon has to say about actually doing the procedure because the anesthesiologist is the one saying “no”. If it’s an issue of too much adipose, sometimes it would mean that the surgery would take longer than it’s safe for the patient to be under anesthesia.
Another possibility is that the first surgeon operates at a facility that doesn’t have access to more advanced technologies or other medical specialists in the event that something goes wrong. And there are some surgeons that are just more willing to accept the risk of a bad outcome, and I would argue that that’s rarely in the patient’s best interest. There are alternative options that the surgeon should discuss with the patient as part of the informed consent process, and sometimes, the alternatives to surgery are just safer than the risk of the surgery itself, even if they aren’t as effective or are a long term treatment (ongoing) as opposed to a definitive treatment (cure). If the patient has a high risk of serious complications, up to and including death, then attempting the curative procedure might be more risk than it’s worth compared to a long term medication that mitigates the disease.
You’ll see this with pregnant patients too. For elective procedures that have safer alternatives or temporizing measures (a holdover treatment until surgery is safe), those are generally preferred to putting a pregnant patient under anesthesia because of all the cardiovascular, immunologic, and other physiologic changes that happen during pregnancy alongside potential risks to the fetus.
The reason for that is that surgeons are rated based on their success percentages meaning they’ll recommend against risky surgeries.
The upside of this is that surgeons aren’t operating willy-nilly on people and will make a proper risk assessment. The downside is that overweight people have an inherently higher risk of complications from surgery, so some surgeons will pass.
It’s not because they think these people don’t need it, it’s because they think it’s too risky. They’re usually not wrong about that, you just need to find a surgeon willing to take the risk or, if possible, reduce the risk by losing weight.
There’s also no point to surgeries if the people aren’t committed and are just going to eat even more and put the weight back on. It’s like consolidating debt to make one payment easier but keeping all the credit cards and building up the debt again. It just makes you worse off
That depends on the surgery. Gastric bypass notoriously has weight requirements, but a gallbladder removal can still kill you if you’re too fat, and there definitely is a point to doing that even if the patient isn’t going to change their diet.
That’s why where I am from you usually need a clearance from a psychiatrist that there are no psychological issues in eating habits that would render that surgery useless, before the surgeon is allowed to do it
Look. Shitty doctors exist, but when 1/3 of the US is overweight, there are underlying issues that need addressing. I only hear horror stories when an addict, alcoholic, or overweight individual in my life is feeling insecure or defensive about a prognosis. Too many people deflect and it’s enabling a much larger issues. Our basic instincts are being exploited.
I don’t know, the medical community ignoring fat people’s health concerns (beyond obesity) and ignoring women’s health concerns, seem to be the same issue and I posit they are the same cause too (hubris, arrogance, and just simply not living up to their oath)
America’s obesity epidemic is a function of our car culture. This is the only country on God’s green Earth that feels putting in sidewalks is a moral failure.
You can’t really know it. I suspect it’s a combination of the two. If you drive everywhere and sit around the rest of the time, you can’t be healthy no matter your diet.
Unless you’ve magically discovered the source of energy and mass from nothing, and revolutionized our understanding of the natural world … no, it isn’t.
When talking about obese individuals, the fat very easily gets in the way of surgery. Compared to a healthy patient the risk of complications during surgery is much greater and really not worth chancing it (most if the time)
For a lot of doctors, the incentive to not do risky procedures is the fact that you have to live with the guilt of your patient’s death, even if you did everything perfectly. Or, you do everything perfectly, but they still have a poor outcome because they weren’t healthy enough to go through the procedure and the recovery, and you get sued for millions of dollars because you didn’t spend 4 hours going through the informed consent with the patient to ensure that every single possible complication was adequately discussed.
I’ve worked in emergency medicine and I’ve had patients die in my care that we had absolutely no way of saving. The screams of their families still haunt me and I will carry those cries of anguish and loss to my grave. I would not perform a procedure that was not 1000000% necessary if the risks are too high because I have enough blood on my hands already, and I haven’t even finished medical school.
I think their point is that doctors don’t want their patients to become entrapped by obesity into lifelong poor health, which also traps them as sources of revenue for corporations that profit from sickness and fat: pharma, companies that sell fad diet and/or exercise plans, etc. So if your doctor tells you to lose weight, it’s probably coming from a good place, regardless of what else might be going on with your health.
(And just in anticipation of some replies I might get: yes, it’s absolutely a real and shitty thing when doctors only see the fat and assume it’s the cause of all the patient’s problems. You deserve better healthcare than that. But also recognize that while the fat might not be the cause of a given problem, it might be exacerbating that problem.)
You are ignorant of the genetic factors at play here and I think you need to realize that your rhetoric is identical to victim blaming eugenics ideology. You sound like RFK Jr. and I’m guessing you would want me dead if you could have things that way. It’s honestly despicable and I don’t know how people like you sleep at night.
Used to see the odd “genetics” fat person and they’d just be built a bit bigger. Now I’m seeing fucking waddling planetoids and that’s not genetics man. Part of that blame belongs to individuals but part of it belongs to the food lobbyists and their quest to add sugar and corn syrup to everything.
Incentivise people to grow their own vegetables (or source them locally from those who already are) and disincentivise the purchase of processed and sweetened food. Have our agencies promote healthy recipes using weight rather than volume measurements and show people how to use scales to properly weigh ingredients and help make it as easy as possible to count calories.
Buddy, you’re over stating the importance of genetics. Time and time again it shows that getting bigger is more nurture than nature. Papers and research retounely come out saying its a two-sides of the same coin issue, but then fail to support their nature/genetics claims, which are often refuted. Slender families get children who end up obese because of lifestyle, and their children become obese. That’s not genetics. The grandchildren end up obese because obese parents place their lifestyle and diets onto their children.
Claiming something is victim blaming is insanely disrespectful to the people who actually get blamed for things out of their control. Your weight is in your control for the vast, VAST majority of people.
People with disabilities who can’t get an opportunity to do something about it? Sure. Can that disability come from genetics, sure. But that’s a small minority of people who are overweight.
Read the sources here and you see that monogenetic, epigenetic and polygenetic obesity is only partly of influence on actually becoming obese, and that with a proper healthy environment (which not everyone has access too, I understand) obesity doesn’t need to develop.
This is a recent problem. Do we think those purported fat genes just evolved in society over the past eightyish years, and spread so widely that, per the 2017-2018 NHANES data, 73% of American adults are overweight (30.7%) or obese (42.4%)? On a population level it’s clear this cannot be genetic. There’s been a cultural shift that has caused this problem, often thought to be related to processed food, less time to cook, and for some underserved communities, food deserts.
Look at how dramatically obesity has risen since the '80s:
It’s an overly simplistic view of the very complex set of issues. Even if we isolate the weight, which we shouldn’t do, even if we assume we should all strive to be of some set weight, which we shouldn’t do even harder, there is no one definitive factor that contributes to that. Reducting it all to “just eat better bro” is, in a lot of cases, akin to saying to a person with depression “just stop being sad”.
There is no “weight gene”, but it doesn’t mean there is no underlying physical issues that a person can’t overcome with just a sheer force of will.
And that’s not even going into the poverty cycle issue, which means that for some people better dietary choices simply unavailable.
Notice, I don’t know the percentage of people with it, but neither do you. But the problem is, weather a person can do something about their weight or not, putting all the, pardon the pun, weight of their bodyshape on them is almost never helpful, and almost always harmful.
Yeah, but an unforgivable number of people simply don’t understand calories, or nutrition, or the benefits of excersise. Like, I know several overweight people, who are profoundly upset at being overweight, but refute the idea that managing calorie intake would help, _genuinely _ believe that all food is equal, and don’t believe excersise would help improve their health.
Hear me out. You’re villainizing me because what I said struck a nerve. You don’t actually believe I want you dead. You’re just upset that I pointed out a deep flaw. Maybe it’s an insecurity, or cognitive dissonance, or whatever. I’m very familiar with this type of response. Whatever it is, realize that someone likely depends on you and that an unhealthy lifestyle is not good for them. I’m encouraging you to do better, if not for yourself, the people in your life you care for. I recognize my ignorance. I’m not a therapist. I’m just stating something I’ve personally observed.
Got a lot to say but I’ll keep it brief-ish. Corporations love unhealthy people. They will artificially celebrate this and reinforce unhealthy lifestyles. This extends beyond weight.
Once entrapped, escape is hard. Some are passive and depressed. Some are dismissive and defensive. No matter which cycle you are in, it’s unhealthy.
I think smoking is bad like I think being overweight is bad. If a doctor says alcohol is killing you, it probably is. I don’t think hatred is deserved, but don’t expect any validation for those choices.
Surely no coincidence that being obese is a gateway to hyperconsumerism anyway. Sugary, fatty, processed snack foods are way more profitable than healthy meals.
Walking around town is free, can’t have that. Sit at this computer chair, watch advertisements and play video games instead.
Heart disease at 26? That’ll be $2k/month until you die.
Get depressed, buy the meds, never leave your couch, don’t fight back, you’re the evolution of humanity and - most of all - you are beautiful.
I am down 50+ pounds, and have another 20 to go. This is new to me, but I absolutely agree with everything you said.
The meme isn’t about that, I’ve read stories of some doctors refusing to perform surguries to overweight people, but other doctors doing the surgery anyway.
The same way a lot of women get told stuff is just from their period by doctors.
I’m a medical student and I have some direct experience with this. Sometimes, the difference between the surgeon who will do the procedure versus the surgeon that won’t do the procedure is the availability of specialized facilities and equipment that they have access to. An elective surgery (i.e. not an emergency surgery) can go from routine to very high risk depending on the amount of adipose tissue the patient has.
And it’s not just a matter of the fat tissue overlying the surgical site. Morbidly obese patients are much more likely to have things like sleep apnea which can make anesthesia more risky and might require more specialized equipment than a particular surgeon/hospital/anesthesiologist might have access to. The “morbid” part of “morbid obesity” also refers to the fact that people above a certain threshold of weight are much more likely to have other health conditions like heart disease that make anesthesia more risky.
This is what I came to say but wasn’t smart enough to put into words. There’s a lot more factors than just being overweight of why a surgery can’t be performed. For a while an issue at my hospital was we were one of the few in the area that could do MRIs on larger patients. So bigger hospitals would transfer these patients to us just for an MRI because their MRI machine was too small or couldn’t handle the weight.
There’s a reason you have to get a pre-op physical exam for any non-emergent surgery. Figuring out if you’ll wake up from the anesthesia at all is part of the calculus that determines whether the benefits of the procedure outweigh the risks.
Would a surgeon unable to do it refer the patient to one who is capable?
Sometimes. It depends why the first surgeon would be unable to do the procedure. If the problem is that the patient might not wake up from anesthesia because of problems with heart disease, lung problems, or other metabolic issues, then it doesn’t really matter what the surgeon has to say about actually doing the procedure because the anesthesiologist is the one saying “no”. If it’s an issue of too much adipose, sometimes it would mean that the surgery would take longer than it’s safe for the patient to be under anesthesia.
Another possibility is that the first surgeon operates at a facility that doesn’t have access to more advanced technologies or other medical specialists in the event that something goes wrong. And there are some surgeons that are just more willing to accept the risk of a bad outcome, and I would argue that that’s rarely in the patient’s best interest. There are alternative options that the surgeon should discuss with the patient as part of the informed consent process, and sometimes, the alternatives to surgery are just safer than the risk of the surgery itself, even if they aren’t as effective or are a long term treatment (ongoing) as opposed to a definitive treatment (cure). If the patient has a high risk of serious complications, up to and including death, then attempting the curative procedure might be more risk than it’s worth compared to a long term medication that mitigates the disease.
You’ll see this with pregnant patients too. For elective procedures that have safer alternatives or temporizing measures (a holdover treatment until surgery is safe), those are generally preferred to putting a pregnant patient under anesthesia because of all the cardiovascular, immunologic, and other physiologic changes that happen during pregnancy alongside potential risks to the fetus.
The reason for that is that surgeons are rated based on their success percentages meaning they’ll recommend against risky surgeries.
The upside of this is that surgeons aren’t operating willy-nilly on people and will make a proper risk assessment. The downside is that overweight people have an inherently higher risk of complications from surgery, so some surgeons will pass.
It’s not because they think these people don’t need it, it’s because they think it’s too risky. They’re usually not wrong about that, you just need to find a surgeon willing to take the risk or, if possible, reduce the risk by losing weight.
There’s also no point to surgeries if the people aren’t committed and are just going to eat even more and put the weight back on. It’s like consolidating debt to make one payment easier but keeping all the credit cards and building up the debt again. It just makes you worse off
That depends on the surgery. Gastric bypass notoriously has weight requirements, but a gallbladder removal can still kill you if you’re too fat, and there definitely is a point to doing that even if the patient isn’t going to change their diet.
That’s why where I am from you usually need a clearance from a psychiatrist that there are no psychological issues in eating habits that would render that surgery useless, before the surgeon is allowed to do it
Look. Shitty doctors exist, but when 1/3 of the US is overweight, there are underlying issues that need addressing. I only hear horror stories when an addict, alcoholic, or overweight individual in my life is feeling insecure or defensive about a prognosis. Too many people deflect and it’s enabling a much larger issues. Our basic instincts are being exploited.
I have some horror stories about being a normal weight woman seeking medical care. What’s that about then?
Different issues have different causes.
I don’t know, the medical community ignoring fat people’s health concerns (beyond obesity) and ignoring women’s health concerns, seem to be the same issue and I posit they are the same cause too (hubris, arrogance, and just simply not living up to their oath)
I know, I’m not arguing for obesity, that would be stupid.
Well someone’s gonna have to
Yes. They’re in the meme.
America’s obesity epidemic is a function of our car culture. This is the only country on God’s green Earth that feels putting in sidewalks is a moral failure.
Obesity is a food issue, our reliance on cars and increasingly sedentary lifestyle may exacerbate the issue but it’s not the cause
You can’t really know it. I suspect it’s a combination of the two. If you drive everywhere and sit around the rest of the time, you can’t be healthy no matter your diet.
It’s obvious that this is not the most important underlying cause, as other countries which are less auto oriented are also quite fat.
Obesity is a product of excess caloric intake NOT sedentary lifestyle.
Lack of cardiovascular and kinesthetic health is a product of a sedentary lifestyle.
It is once again, incredibly simplistic view of a very complicated issue, so simplistic it stops being accurate.
Unless you’ve magically discovered the source of energy and mass from nothing, and revolutionized our understanding of the natural world … no, it isn’t.
Similarly - if you are trans and on HRT, every problem is due to your hormones.
When talking about obese individuals, the fat very easily gets in the way of surgery. Compared to a healthy patient the risk of complications during surgery is much greater and really not worth chancing it (most if the time)
I’m guessing that’s under the US health system, where doctors are incentivised to only perform surgeries with a low risk of complications
For a lot of doctors, the incentive to not do risky procedures is the fact that you have to live with the guilt of your patient’s death, even if you did everything perfectly. Or, you do everything perfectly, but they still have a poor outcome because they weren’t healthy enough to go through the procedure and the recovery, and you get sued for millions of dollars because you didn’t spend 4 hours going through the informed consent with the patient to ensure that every single possible complication was adequately discussed.
I’ve worked in emergency medicine and I’ve had patients die in my care that we had absolutely no way of saving. The screams of their families still haunt me and I will carry those cries of anguish and loss to my grave. I would not perform a procedure that was not 1000000% necessary if the risks are too high because I have enough blood on my hands already, and I haven’t even finished medical school.
What countries medical system encourages risky surgeries? As far as I’m aware “reducing risk” is most of the game in medicine
I’m just sitting here waiting for the point of what you said. 60 people upvoted, but you didn’t say anything.
The phrase of the day (which you should Google of you downvote this) is pseudo-profound bullshit.
I think their point is that doctors don’t want their patients to become entrapped by obesity into lifelong poor health, which also traps them as sources of revenue for corporations that profit from sickness and fat: pharma, companies that sell fad diet and/or exercise plans, etc. So if your doctor tells you to lose weight, it’s probably coming from a good place, regardless of what else might be going on with your health.
(And just in anticipation of some replies I might get: yes, it’s absolutely a real and shitty thing when doctors only see the fat and assume it’s the cause of all the patient’s problems. You deserve better healthcare than that. But also recognize that while the fat might not be the cause of a given problem, it might be exacerbating that problem.)
You count just say you disagree and explain why it upset you.
You are ignorant of the genetic factors at play here and I think you need to realize that your rhetoric is identical to victim blaming eugenics ideology. You sound like RFK Jr. and I’m guessing you would want me dead if you could have things that way. It’s honestly despicable and I don’t know how people like you sleep at night.
Used to see the odd “genetics” fat person and they’d just be built a bit bigger. Now I’m seeing fucking waddling planetoids and that’s not genetics man. Part of that blame belongs to individuals but part of it belongs to the food lobbyists and their quest to add sugar and corn syrup to everything.
Incentivise people to grow their own vegetables (or source them locally from those who already are) and disincentivise the purchase of processed and sweetened food. Have our agencies promote healthy recipes using weight rather than volume measurements and show people how to use scales to properly weigh ingredients and help make it as easy as possible to count calories.
Buddy, you’re over stating the importance of genetics. Time and time again it shows that getting bigger is more nurture than nature. Papers and research retounely come out saying its a two-sides of the same coin issue, but then fail to support their nature/genetics claims, which are often refuted. Slender families get children who end up obese because of lifestyle, and their children become obese. That’s not genetics. The grandchildren end up obese because obese parents place their lifestyle and diets onto their children.
Claiming something is victim blaming is insanely disrespectful to the people who actually get blamed for things out of their control. Your weight is in your control for the vast, VAST majority of people.
People with disabilities who can’t get an opportunity to do something about it? Sure. Can that disability come from genetics, sure. But that’s a small minority of people who are overweight.
[citation needed]
Read the sources here and you see that monogenetic, epigenetic and polygenetic obesity is only partly of influence on actually becoming obese, and that with a proper healthy environment (which not everyone has access too, I understand) obesity doesn’t need to develop.
https://obesitymedicine.org/blog/obesity-and-genetics/
Meanwhile, where are the sources supporting the initial statement?
This is a recent problem. Do we think those purported fat genes just evolved in society over the past eightyish years, and spread so widely that, per the 2017-2018 NHANES data, 73% of American adults are overweight (30.7%) or obese (42.4%)? On a population level it’s clear this cannot be genetic. There’s been a cultural shift that has caused this problem, often thought to be related to processed food, less time to cook, and for some underserved communities, food deserts.
Look at how dramatically obesity has risen since the '80s:
It’s an overly simplistic view of the very complex set of issues. Even if we isolate the weight, which we shouldn’t do, even if we assume we should all strive to be of some set weight, which we shouldn’t do even harder, there is no one definitive factor that contributes to that. Reducting it all to “just eat better bro” is, in a lot of cases, akin to saying to a person with depression “just stop being sad”.
There is no “weight gene”, but it doesn’t mean there is no underlying physical issues that a person can’t overcome with just a sheer force of will.
And that’s not even going into the poverty cycle issue, which means that for some people better dietary choices simply unavailable.
Notice, I don’t know the percentage of people with it, but neither do you. But the problem is, weather a person can do something about their weight or not, putting all the, pardon the pun, weight of their bodyshape on them is almost never helpful, and almost always harmful.
Yeah, but an unforgivable number of people simply don’t understand calories, or nutrition, or the benefits of excersise. Like, I know several overweight people, who are profoundly upset at being overweight, but refute the idea that managing calorie intake would help, _genuinely _ believe that all food is equal, and don’t believe excersise would help improve their health.
Hear me out. You’re villainizing me because what I said struck a nerve. You don’t actually believe I want you dead. You’re just upset that I pointed out a deep flaw. Maybe it’s an insecurity, or cognitive dissonance, or whatever. I’m very familiar with this type of response. Whatever it is, realize that someone likely depends on you and that an unhealthy lifestyle is not good for them. I’m encouraging you to do better, if not for yourself, the people in your life you care for. I recognize my ignorance. I’m not a therapist. I’m just stating something I’ve personally observed.
And you sound like a moron. OP didn’t say anything and you said even less.