Arguments For Calling Obesity A Disease #6: Attitude Of Health Care Providers

Next, in my miniseries on arguments to support calling obesity (defined as excess or abnormal body fat that affects your health), I turn to the impact on health care providers.

Currently, most health care practitioners will happily limit their role in obesity management to warning their patients about the many health consequences of carrying excess weight and advise them to lose weight. They do not, however, see it as their job to actually provide treatment.

This is in stark contrast to diabetes or hypertension, where doctors do see helping patients control their blood glucose or blood pressure levels as an essential part of their job. Here, simply telling patients that they need to lower their blood glucose or blood pressure would not be deemed enough. Helping patients control their blood glucose or blood pressure, happens to be an important part of their job description.

One reason that health care providers have gotten away with simply telling patients to lose weight without actually helping them do so, is precisely because they have never viewed obesity as a disease. Rather, they (as much of the public) have looked at excess weight (and weight loss) as simply a matter of personal “lifestyle” – something that people with obesity should be able to manage on their own.

This, incidentally is one of the main reasons why many doctors are not happy with obesity being called a disease. I have actually heard a colleague ask me, “Why should this be my job? Why can’t they (sic) just eat less and move more – how difficult can that be?”.

That, is exactly the attitude adjustment that calling obesity a chronic disease can change. Perhaps not in the generation of doctors and other health professionals who have grown up thinking of obesity as a “lifestyle choice”. But hopefully, in the next generation of health care providers, for whom treating and helping their patients manage their obesity will be no different from treating and helping patients living with any other chronic disease.

@DrSharma
Edmonton, AB