Nov 24, 2009 5:59 pm US/Eastern
Study: Doctors May Be Biased Against Obese People
BALTIMORE (WJZ) ―
With obesity rates climbing in the U.S., there's important information that might affect you.
Healthwatch reporter Kellye Lynn says if you're obese, it could impact the quality of your care.
Right now, about 127 million adults in the U.S. are overweight and half as many are obese. If you're one of them, a new study finds your doctor could be biased against you.
For more than 30 years of his life, Ralph Loglisci was obese. At his heaviest, he weighed more than 400 pounds.
"I don't remember a time when I wasn't heavy or thought I was heavy," he said.
When he was 34, Ralph changed his eating habits and started exercising. His 200 pound weight loss was so impressive, it landed him on the front of Baltimore Magazine.
Even though the extra weight is gone, he says memories of doctor discrimination are still fresh in his mind.
"As an adult going to the doctor or even as a high school student, it's kind of a demoralizing experience," he said.
Not just for Ralph. A study published by Johns Hopkins researchers shows doctors tend to have less respect for their obese patients.
"As their obesity increased, there was an increased risk of having low respect from their physician," said Dr. Mary Margaret Huizinga.
Dr. Huizinga and her colleagues had primary care doctors and their patients fill out questionnaires. They discovered the higher a patient's body mass index, the higher the disrespect from their doctors.
How important is respect? Studies show patients who are positively viewed by their doctors receive more medical information during their visit.
"It's not right that physicians don't respect a group of patients just because of a physical attribute that they have. I think of it as a social injustice," Huizinga said.
This isn't the first study to reach this conclusion. Huizinga says one way to curb the problem is to educate medical students about weight bias before they become doctors.
To read more about the study, click
here.
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