‘Don’t Weigh Me’ Cards Are Game-Changing for Doctors Appointments
self.com
self.com
Then I scrolled to the end and saw: "You can order your own 'Please don’t weigh me' cards"... So it's just a bunch of grifters grifting away and preying on people's insecurities. Nothing to see here.
Medical science relies on so many crucial data points based on mass, which is most easily determined via measuring weight.
Without your weight: A Doctor cannot safely prescribe anything. A Doctor cannot verify whether changes in your weight may containdicate a pre-existing course of treatment. Second-opinions to sanity check a physician making a high impact diagnosis is right out.
What is wrong with people? Valuing avoidance of being confronted with an objective fact that makes you feel bad over not dying or not being treatable?
I just don't understand.
You can be squeamish with just about everyone else. Never your Physician.
If you want to stick with something objective: if your biggest association with going to see a doctor is being made to feel like crap about your weight, then you will see your doctor less.
I already avoid going to the doctor more than I should, and that's mostly based on inconvenience. If it were a miserable experience, then I know I would procrastinate even more aggressively.
But setting that aside, I think there are a number of reasons why this could make some amount of sense. Doctors do over-focus on weight, not bothering to look for any specific causes because they've supposedly already figured out the problem. Which means the patient leaves with an instruction to lose weight, they don't, and nothing changes. And being fat isn't as highly correlated with health outcomes as people—including doctors—assume. There are plenty of healthy fat people and unhealthy thin people.
There are many other legitimate reasons to control how your doctor approaches an issue. You may have tried the common fixes and know that trying slight variations is unlikely to be fruitful. You are an expert on your own body, with massive gaps when it comes to medical knowledge and details. Your doctor is an expert on human bodies in general, with massive gaps when it comes to specific patients' bodies.
I'm not going to argue that the right answer is to not weigh at all. There are a lot of other options, like not telling the patient the weight. And/or skipping the sermon on weight. Bringing up weight only in the context where it matters. Being specific about what aspect of weight is relevant. (Is it really the mass causing mechanical failure, or are we talking about fatty tissue? Endocrine problems?)
In a perfect world, measuring weight wouldn't be an issue because your doctor would be sensitive yet persuasive, and patients wouldn't be hung up on it and would be making rational choices (eg "I'm fat because it's a side effect of doing things that make me happy and this is what works for me right now.") We don't live in a perfect world. We need to do the best in the actual situation, and handing over all power to the doctor does not have that result.
Does anyone believe that not weighing them will change this? If you're large enough that the doctor assumes it's a primary medical concern, they can probably reach the same conclusion without the scales.
Not trying to be anti-anyone, just .. not sure it's solving the right problem.
> Please don't weigh me unless it's (really) medically necessary. If you really need my weight, please tell me why so that I can give you my informed consent.
Not as "daft" as the headline, is it?
Reading this you realize that folks who are fat may not know (or don't want to know) just how many correlations there are between issues with weight and illness / disease, including mental health issues
I actually wish they'd do things like tie weight screening into things like a mental health referral for depression / self esteem etc support.
Bottom line, obseity is associate with large decreases in life expectancy and higher incidence of early mortality. Given the billions spent on other areas of health (including end of life care) there is probably a fair bit of bang for the buck in actually being more aggressive here.
Just like they want to mandate employers force shots on all staff, you might have strong outcomes if they forced employers to mandate all staff exercise 2x per day for 30 minutes (fitness / stretching etc) - monitored eating during the day to healthy diet etc.
I'm not saying this should happen, but the crazy lockdowns due to COVID for kids (massive impact, modest benefit) - they might not be focusing on areas of greatest payoff.
Yeah, and if I know I'm going to get a lecture about my weight that I've already heard, I'm going to put off going to the doctor.
What is the difference in outcomes from going to the doctor timely vs waiting 3 months?
Also, consider that the medical industry does a pretty bad job of adapting to the bodies people have, and all of the downstream data that drives. For example, you need a proper size blood pressure cuff to get an accurate measurement, but the larger and smaller than 'regular' cuffs are usually not immediately available, so medical staff just tries to wing it when presented with a larger or smaller arm.
One way to view this is as a component of bedside manner. Some patients need to be educated (and perhaps won't need the card after certain things have been explained to them). Patients with hard-earned sensitivities need a little extra hand-holding. For example, people with phobias of needles need some extra hand-holding. The doctor/nurse doesn't "have better things to do" in that case -- most have training to mitigate the patient's anxiety in that situation. Why should this be different?
From my experience, I don't get weighed by unrelated medical practitioners but when it is relevant for tracking my health. Unless there are cases outside of my life experience where people are being weighed, that context adds an implication to the card's existence and text that most of these existing weigh-ins are not medically necessary and that you need to justify each time you do do a weigh in.
With that said, as I read the article more, I can understand receiving accommodations specifically dealing with body image and eating disorders (as well as improvements with how doctor's deal with weight). How to make those accommodations while also tracking vitals important for your health is tricky. Needing to deal with unhealthy habits and unhealthy weight is a real thing. Its also a real thing when doctor's dismiss patients as lying when they are living healthy when it turns out there are other underlying conditions (like PCOS). None of this is in my life experience but I've been slowly hearing from more friends who have had to deal with this, like a very active folk dancer who eventually found out she had PCOS no thanks to her doctors that accused her of lying about her habits.
> A tendency to see size over everything else may lead providers to misdiagnose patients in larger bodies and misattribute symptoms to size instead of the true underlying condition.
Their primary purpose isn't to deal with shame, its to ask doctors to not jump to the conclusion that the problem is the weight. There are examples in a linked article on the site: https://www.self.com/story/weight-stigma-kept-me-out-of-doct...
> Later, I found another doctor for an annual checkup. At the appointment, he physically recoiled at the sight of me. He quickly told me I’d need to lose weight before I saw him next, then left the exam room. My body was never touched, never examined. I learned nothing new about my health, and was left only with the searing shame of believing that even a professional couldn’t bear to touch my body.
> At another appointment, a nurse took my blood pressure four times. When I asked her if I was okay, she told me my blood pressure must be wrong. "Obese patients don’t usually have low blood pressure," she said. Even my health was impossible to believe.
That's dumb, because doctors that are weight-fixated (which is a real problem) aren't going to be less weight-fixated with a patient that is visibly defensive around weight. It centers attention on the thing you want least attention on. If you've got a doctor with this problem and it is interfering with your care, you don't need a ”don’t weigh me” card you need a different doctor.
(OTOH, I’ve seen the “don’t weigh unless specifically necessary, and don't put the weight in follow-up notes” thing, whether in card or oral-request form, recommended for people with eating disorders where seeing/knowing their current weight can be a trigger, and think it is wholly sensible there.)
However, poor bedside manner aside…if your obese it is a pretty good bet that it’s going to kill you, and kill you early…which is why docs focus on it.
Perhaps if I'd said I don't know they would've measured, but this was also at the height of covid (Dr had two masks and a face shield on)
I was worried about it but several cardiologists explained it to me that if it's for a short time, these values are harmless and I shouldn't worry but continue observing it.
It is expected that patients are medically illiterate but to be the best patient for a doctor is the best thing you could do for your physical health. The scale is just an accurate representation of reality just like your LDH level.
People avoid going to the doctor for all kinds of irrational reasons. This is a way to entice a population that'd be embarrassed by a public weigh in (and thus avoid care) with an easy way out of their shame (thus hopefully not avoiding care).
I believe it's safe to assert that the set of people for whom the determining factor in whether or not they seek medical care, or not, is a function of the actual stepping on a scale, is so small as to be a distraction.
What general BMI someone is and what relevance that might have to whatever concerns bring them in, will of course be easily judged by health care professionals.
The value in tracking a number is as others have said, specific and obvious, that it affords an opportunity to detect changes and incorporate them in a model that has to be constructed very quickly about potential diagnoses if any and next steps.
IMO this is in large part grift which is wittingly or unwittingly in service of the broader politicization of expertise, which from my perspective amounts to nothing so much as an opting out of a science-based consensus reality in service of toy notions of liberty and what "harm" looks like.