The Australian health establishment has denounced a proposal for doctors to stop calling chronically overweight people obese and start calling them fat instead.
The idea is that calling people fat will have more emotional impact, effectively shaming them into doing something about their weight. Sorry to have to point this out but chronically obese people already get called fat, just usually not to their faces. Besides, many overweight people openly talk about themselves being a fat person.
Now the Royal Australian College of GPs says it is a rude and insulting term, preferring “obese” instead because patients should always be treated with respect.
“Doctors should always bring up the topic of being overweight because it is a major health problem, there’s no denying that. But it’s no excuse for bad manners,” said RACGP spokesman Dr Ronald McCoy.
Hang on - every medical professional I have seen in the past decade has been rude and insulting about my smoking. “It’ll kill you,” they’ll say bluntly. “You’ll leave your family behind. What will they do then? Now let’s have a look at that knee.”
Insulting smokers at any opportunity is a de facto policy of our health services.
If obesity is the ticking time bomb that the health establishment keeps saying it is, why not apply some of the same tactics that have worked against smokers?
Let’s be clear about two things: being rude to anyone about their appearance is the height of incivility, and there’s a distinction between someone who is overweight but at least does some exercise and watches their diet, and the person who is overweight and sits around all day chomping Doritos.
The core of what British Health Minister Anne Milton was driving at when she raised the idea of banning the use of the word “obese” by UK health services, was this: “If I look in the mirror and think I am obese I think I am less worried (than) if I think I am fat.”
To me it makes patent sense for doctors to encourage obese people to take ownership over their weight. Calling it “obesity” amounts to a diagnosis, as if it’s a medical condition afflicting the patient, rather than a matter of a lack of healthy diet and exercise.
But health professionals disagree. in the Herald Sun today Monash University sociologist Samantha Thomas says blaming and shaming overweight people did not motivate them to lose weight, according to research.
The word “fat” could be very stigmatising and research had shown this would push overweight people away, Dr Thomas said.
“You don’t create behaviour change by making people feel bad about themselves,” she said.
Surely that’s why those anti-smoking ads show a mother being told she has cancer and then has to go home and tell the kids. That couldn’t make any smoker with kids feel bad about themselves.
I’m sure “research” also showed at some point that putting pictures of gangrenous feet and cancerous pus being squeezed out of a bronchus would make smokers reach for the packet too.
Anti-smoking campaigning has traded on stigmatising and marginalising smokers. Most effective of all was the passive smoking movement. Every smoker has a story about sitting in a park having a durry only to be shrieked at by some uppity suburbanite 20 yards away asking if they would mind smoking somewhere else. Like China.
According to various surveys Australians are among the fattest people in the world. This has significant implications for public health services – diabetes, which is linked to poor diet and being overweight, is already rapidly rising. There is also a higher risk of heart disease and stroke, as with smoking.
Smoking an addiction which can be treated with medical help but it is also a lifestyle choice. We need to start talking about obesity in the same terms if we are to tackle it for the public health challenge that these politically correct medical professionals keep telling us it is.
Postscript: A visionary cross-portfolio national obesity strategy would be good grounds for a policy in the current election campaign. Fat chance?
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