A Weight-centric health paradigm, which places body Weight at the core of ideas about health, is one that is shared by both public health and the medical system. Although this emphasis on Weight has been ingrained in medical for many years, society has been exposed to it for far longer.
Sociologist Sabrina Strings claims in her book “Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia” that “the present anti-fat bias in the United States and in most of the West was not formed in the medical sector.” Since at least the seventeenth century, racial scientific literature has asserted that obesity is “savage” and “black.”
It implies that there is a greater chance that the medical system may cause them damage. According to Marquisele Mercedes, a doctoral student at Brown University School of Public Health, “For over 60 years, doctors and researchers have likely harmed and killed millions of fat people through their insistence on social and scientific mandates for thinness and that ob*sity is a disease requiring intervention, despite the existence of evidence that suggests otherwise,” in her article “No Health, No Care: The Big Fat Loophole in the Hippocratic Oath,” published in the online magazine Pipe Wre
Research has shown that doctors and other health care professionals frequently hold anti-fat biases. What then leads to the persistence of Weight-centrism in healthcare and the resulting health inequalities? According to Lisa Erlanger, MD, clinical professor of family medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine, it is complex.
Be First to Comment