Literally experienced this, thin privilege backfiring on me. My small fat roommate and I were the same age. We both went in for a physical at around the same time. She got a whole shitload of bloodwork that gave her cholesterol level, blood sugar, and told her about many vitamin deficiencies. I asked for the same, and was told my insurance wouldn’t cover it. I had better insurance than her.

I had to beg to get my b12 level tested, because my family has a history of depression and I’d heard there was a relationship, and my doctor kind of fudged a reason to check that and one other thing. Later, I got a bill, because my insurance refused to cover it.

Turned out my b12 was DANGEROUSLY low. I was well into the “psychiatric side effects” range. (I’d just gotten used to hiding in the bathroom and sobbing multiple times a week at work. I… don’t do that anymore.)

What other vitamins am I deficient in? I have no idea. I’m taking C and D and kind of hoping for the best.

Because fatphobia and healthism say that because I’m thin and relatively young, I can’t possibly be unhealthy.

Weight first treatment kills everyone

This is why I shy away from the doctor. Every single ailment I have is because I’m fat according to them. It hurts my feelings a lot. Maybe I’m just sick because I’m sick?

My doctor actually recently (two weeks ago) had the gall to try to diagnose me for sleep apnea and allergies (caused by the sleep apnea) because I made an appointment for a check up because I was sick, congested, and had a sore throat.

He gave me a prescription for fucking Zyrtec and told me I should get a sleep study done because my weight was likely the cause.

I went and got a second opinion from a local walk in clinic and turns out I had a fucking upper respiratory infection (caused by a virus) and it was on its way to becoming pneumonia. It had NOTHING to do with my weight.

I’m lucky I didn’t actually end up in the fucking hospital over it.

Yeah, you should let your doctor know that the one study that claimed to prove that fat physiologically caused sleep apnea turned out to have been falsified. The researcher admitted to it, retracted the study, and accepted censure. We’ve posted about it a couple of times now. The researcher’s name is Robert Fogel, and if you look around, you can find the official retraction. Maybe take that in to your doctor.

On the other hand, poor sleep does seem to cause weight gain, which suggests that for any correlation between fat and sleep apnea, the causation runs the other way.

-MG

The amount of fatshaming in medicine is ridiculous. I noticed during the very first year of my medical studies that doctors will try to pin everything on people being fat, including the flu or too thin hair. They will even say stuff like “but they weren’t even overweight????” when a person dies of heart failure as THE FIRST THING they can think of. They never say “but they didn’t even smoke” or “they didn’t even have high cholesterol”. They say “wait they weren’t fat why were they ill”

It gets even worse in Psychiatry. “Well if you lost weight maybe that would help the depression”, “I don’t understand why he’s still so unsure of himself. He lost about 40 pounds, he looks great.”

 I have literally heard someone say to a rape victim “He chose you because he knew from your body type that you weren’t likely to outrun him.” 

For decades, my mother-in-law had been a bit rounder than most women - mostly genetic, as many women in her family have been that way historically, and been perfectly healthy - but was experiencing a strange, seemingly randomly-occurring symptom of blood in her urine from time to time.

Doctor after doctor would look for the cause, but most fell back on some variation of her being overweight. Meanwhile, she continued steadily gaining weight, year after year, even though she ate less and less.

At the beginning of Thanksgiving week 2010, she went in for a checkup with her new primary care physician. They went over various things - like how tired and drained my mother-in-law felt, for a start - and as they were about to leave, the doctor had them drop off a blood sample, because she had a hunch and wanted to check something (creatinine levels, in case anyone is curious).

When they got home from the visit, the phone was ringing. It was the doctor.

“Good news! I know what your problem is. Bad news, your kidneys are failing. Go to the hospital now.”

Her kidneys had dropped below 10% function, the minimum for healthy living. It turned out, after extensive testing and a lucky incident, that she’d been having small, minor kidney infections for decades, which had been slowly chipping away at her kidney function - hence the ‘random’ blood in her urine.

Doctors had mostly just told her to lose weight and get more fit - when it reality, she was retaining water because her kidneys were slowly failing. She was otherwise completely asymptomatic for kidney failure.

The first week of dialysis, they extracted fifty pounds of water from her. It was agony to go through, but she felt amazingly better after that (wonder of wonders, a working faux-kidney, and she felt better? gasp).

But the fat-shaming didn’t stop there. Later, once we’d determined I could give her a kidney, her assigned transplant doctor’s first statement upon entering the room (she’d been previously instructed to lose weight to a certain point, to make the surgery safer, which she’d actually been doing just fine, if a tad slowly) was, “Your problem is portion control.”

At that point in time, she was eating no more than 800-1000 calories per day, and feeling full from that, but he didn’t believe that she was being truthful, and for the duration of the time she had to interact with him, he continually insisted she was eating too much. (She still eats less than everyone else in the house, and she’s the only one ‘classically’ overweight, though much less so than before the transplant).

By the time of the transplant, she was down to only 3% kidney function, despite dialysis six nights a week. Had this not been caught when it was, we probably would have lost her by then.

Thankfully, since giving her one of my kidneys, she’s been able to maintain a healthy weight and be more active, though she will always remain ‘rounder’ because of her genetics.

For years, doctors assumed all her problems were because she was overweight when, in fact, her being as overweight as she had been was a symptom of an underlying problem.

Unfriendly remind that ~25% of thin people have “obese” problems which leads to awful things, like has been said. If you’re thin, please be careful about believing doctors who just say, “you’re not overweight, so you’re fine!” b/c fatphobia is shit.

This is so obnoxious. I am very small built so not only does everyone think I’m very healthy, but they think I am skinny and constantly comment on how little I must eat. As a small child I was a bean pole and light as a feathery. Then I suddenly gained weight with puberty. I am 5'3" and when I was fifteen I weighed 160 LBs. I was miserable and uncomfortable because I am small boned and lethargic regardless of my weight so I couldn’t handle the extra weight. Literally doctors told me that my weight was healthy. My bmi must have been twice what it is now at 135 LBs. I had chronic knee pain. But because I was “so tiny!” and “not fat just have a cute little double chin!” Because I wasn’t “fat” in other people’s perceptions I was ignored when I complained that my weight bothered me. I eventually lost the weight through vigorous exercise, 90 minutes a day on a bike. (and in hindsight was really over working myself) I still don’t know if that is the cause because due to neglect, poverty and financial abuse I still haven’t received any consistent medical care, my hair became and remains dramatically thinner than during childhood and early adolescence and I have a number of health issues that I don’t recall having before I lost the weight. End rant.

I lost my ovary because of my weight. When I was in college, I was walking to class with my friend, (and carrying about 60+ pounds worth of art supplies), and I felt a hard and painful *pop* in my lower abdomen. I dropped to the ground and was rushed to the campus urgent care, where they told me it was probably a hernia and needed to see my doctor. Now, I’m not exactly skinny. I’m 4'11 and over 160 pounds. Besides fibromyalgia, physically I’m relatively healthy. I went to my physician, a little beanpole of a woman, who, to my every complaint replied “it’s constipation. You need to lose weight and you’ll be more regular.” Well, for two years I kept getting the same response. The same pain, in the same place. Finally one day at work it got so bad that I collapsed on the floor crying in the middle of a breakfast rush. I had to actually get angry and raise my voice before my doctor would send me for scans, and she said “maybe it’s appendicitis.” After getting an MRI, it was discovered that I had a tumor in my ovary that had been there since I was born but started growing when I reached adulthood. In the past two years it had been growing and destroying my ovary. If it had been dealt with when it first presented, They would have been able to save my ovary and since the tumor wouldn’t have been so huge, the surgery wouldn’t have been so invasive and my recovery would have been much shorter and much less painful. But since I was overweight, my doctor just assumed that it could be solved with exercise and a better diet. (Which I had already been working on.) TL:DR because I’m fat, my doctor ignored my unrelated health problems so now I’m less likely to have children.

I was refused birth control by my doctor because of my weight. She essentially told me that she wouldn’t trust me to take the pills on a regular schedule unless I lost a significant amount of weight and proved to her that I had the discipline for it.

When I had my gallbladder problems which I lived with undiagnosed for 5 months, (mix of genetics and the Yasmin I was taking. The Yasmin just sped things along) I had an attack that left me weak and unable to breathe properly. So I was rushed to the hospital. Not only was I asked with serious lack of caring if I was in labour.. When I said no, she took her sweet time checking me in and then handed me that god awful heartburn shit that they give people. I nearly puked it up.

When I finally got to see the ER doctor she was more interested with taking a phone call from another hospital then treating me. When she finally did take a moment to “treat” me it was two slaps on the back declared I didn’t have a kidney infection, and that it was acid reflux and my back injury I got from a 40lbs box of chickens falling on me at an old job. With a thinly veiled comment to lose weight my problems would go away.

Saw my GP the next day and he could feel something poking through my ribs and set me up for an emergency ultrasound.

On the way home I had another attack and my mom just thought I was hungry, since I hadn’t eaten in days. Are two grapes puked them back up pretty much right then and there. She called the doctor office and they told her to take me in and that they were phoning to let the hospital know I was coming. When I finally saw the second doctor (7ish hours after I arrived at the ER) he did lab work and found I had a failing liver.

I had an ultra sound the next day and found out that I had gallstones, pancreatitis that was days away from going septic and because of that a failing liver.

Lucky me got surgery four days after everything was said and done, but that first doctor in the ER could have killed me. I’m glad I didn’t believe her that my problem was weight related.

Doctors blaming all my issues on my weight instead of checking and treating my (turns out) severe autoimmune hypothyroidism (which, wow, was contributing to my weight) meant that I had to have a complete thyroidectomy and follow-up radiation treatment because the damage and hypertrophy in my thyroid had turned into a massive blob of thyroid cancer that was compressing my trachea.

Now I may or may not have lymphoma and will have to be on daily medication and a kidney-pummeling amount of calcium for the rest of my life! Thanks, medical establishment.

Thanks to my old Dr, it was 5 years before I was diagnosed with my autoimmune disease! Everything was because I was fat! Broke a toe stubbing it on a wooden stair, it’s because of my fat.
The constant chronic pain/inflammation all due to my weight
My depression, anxiety and compulsive behaviors are all due to my fat as well
Migraines? Fat
Insomnia? Fatty fat
Anxiety? FAT
Every cold or bout of pneumonia FAT
Gynecological pain? WAY TOO FAT

Thankfully I have a new Dr and he *listens* to me.
I have Fibromyalgia.
I have Akylosing Spondylitis
I have a rheumatologist
I have a pain management specialist
I have a gynecologist
I have a urologist
A fantastic Dr who listens to me, right away.

Me: Both my legs hurt. I can’t walk normally.

Doctor: Ok but you have diabetes because fat

Me: I don’t have diabetes. I don’t even have pre-diabetes. Look, here’s my bloodwork. My a1c is so normal it could ski the Bell Curve.

Doctor: Ok but diabetes. 

Me: No.

Doctor: Ok but you should lose weight because your big fat ass is causing mechanical issues in your legs. 

Me: … that seems fake, but okay. I’ll do what you say.

Me: Hey doc, I can’t lose weight because I CANNOT WALK OR EXERCISE AT ALL. It’s been 2 years. I can’t go to the bathroom on my own anymore.

Doc: How about I do another MRI on your ankles?

@adhocavenger: Fuck this asshole. Let’s go to another doctor.

Doctor Kate: … this is nerve pain. Maybe you have a compressed disc pressing on your spine. Let’s MRI your spine.

Me: Ok. 

Doctor Kate: … uhhhhhh, you have a tumor the size of a large grape inside your spine; it’s compressing your spinal cord and that’s why your everything hurts. Good thing we caught it before it destroyed your spine and left you paralyzed entirely.

Me: … so it isn’t because I’m fat?

Doctor Kate: … fat doesn’t make tumors inside your spine. That doctor is stupid and I will call him and tell his office to never call you again, because he is a jerk. But not being able to move probably caused you to not be able to lose weight like he demanded.

Me: Oh. Okay. 

So… yeah.

fat hatred kills, fat people aren’t a protected class under any legislation in my state, which means MDs could legally say, ‘I don’t treat fat people’, with no legal consequence, but they don’t, they fake-treat fat people, take fees from us to deliver the same deep medical insights, we can get for free by reading the cover of Cosmo Magazine, and that bullshit delays/prevents fat people, from getting actual medical treatment, it’s a swindle, and it kills people, but hey, the docs get paid, and they’re only hurting fat people, nbd. (via welkinalauda)

There’s a small but growing number of doctors who do refuse to see fat people.