Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

hn_throwaway_99

It's grown a bit tiresome when a company or organization needs to do something for a straightforward physical reason and then people try to blame them for "fat shaming".

The article is pretty clear further down on the reasons for these limitations:

> The reasons are largely practical ones. Most medical school tables are not large enough to accommodate a human being larger than 200 lbs or longer than 6' tall. Donated bodies also have to be moved by students and/or researchers, and heavier bodies are harder to move, posing injury risk. Dissection is also made more difficult when a cadaver carries more fat—the dissector has to cut through the layers of fatty tissue to reach the body's organs.

But then the article also tries to hype up that not taking her donation is some kind of injustice:

> But Scott McPherson knows first hand there's something unpleasant about denying a person's dying wishes, too. "My mom just wanted to donate her body for something she believed in," he says. Instead, the McPhersons founds themselves trying to figure out an after-death plan for their mother that went against everything she'd asked them to do.

The whole irony in this is the journalist deliberately used (while true) an extremely insensitive title to get you to click, "Americans Are Too Fat to Donate Their Bodies to Science", but then tries to highlight how insensitive it is that schools won't/can't take obese full-body donations.

Society decides what is acceptable by making it acceptable. Universities used to not have wheelchair ramps; a similar provocative title in those days may have been "Americans can't walk well enough to learn". The reason people couldn't access those buildings was a straightforward _physical_ reason yet it was still a deliberate choice to make those buildings accessible to people who could walk and inaccessible to those who could not.

When a medical school purchases tables, a decision must be made as to what kinds of corpses it will accommodate, and the decision has been made that 200lb, 6' is the limit. That choice could have been different.

For the record, I don't think this instance is fat-shaming, for the reason that the bodies were donated with the goal of advancing science in some nebulous way, not specifically to be dissected at a medical school. So the cost of buying an expanded table may prevent the school from buying a different, more useful piece of equipment, and it's probably not directly going against the person's wishes.

I'm good friends with a guy who works at Walmart, he's an assistant store manager, and has worked there since we were in high school.

About 10 years back he was telling me about the scooters they have in the store, and how they had started receiving a heavier-duty model. I forgot the exact weight capacity-but it was somewhere around 500lbs.

Then it dawned on me that somewhere along the line, people had to complain about the scooters not being big enough, or enough scooters were damaged by large individuals. Enough people eventually complained that Walmart had a meeting at their corporate offices to decide "how big" of customers they were going to accommodate with the newer, heavier-duty scooters.

There were probably polls and studies, weighing people out in the field, etc. Not to mention the work the company that provides the scooters had to do.

That is partially true, but it misses 2 important factors:

1. Accommodating larger people usually is just fundamentally more expensive. Space costs money. I mean, airplane seats are famously narrow, and while yes, it's a deliberate chose, if airplane seats were considerably wider it would make airlines unprofitable. I'm not saying that's a big reason here (designing a bigger table isn't that much in the grand scheme of things), but it's not just deciding between two equally valid choices.

2. A bigger reason in this case, though, which is pointed out in the article, is that most of these bodies are used for dissection and training. Dissecting an obese body, if doing it for the purpose of anatomical study, is much, much more difficult.

> Dissection is also made more difficult when a cadaver carries more fat—the dissector has to cut through the layers of fatty tissue to reach the body's organs.

Making this particular accommodation has consequences: surgeons turn fat patients away because they don't know how to operate on them. Surgeons can be quite rude in the delivery of that decision, to the point of fat-shaming. While the policy itself might have short-term bona fide reasons, tables can be made bigger and students could be gaining experience with gantries used to move large patients. The medical industry is making perfect the enemy of good in refusing to care for fat patients, and refusing fat cadavers is just one aspect of that.

Wouldn't this in turn enable what is, by and large, an avoidable state of self that adds considerable strain on an already overly-taxed medical system?

Placing the burden of reducing strain on a medical system as bad as the USA's is ridiculous. There are reasons to want to avoid obesity but how is one of them to accommodate the medical system? The reasoning is completely backwards. It's like saying that the legal system should not get better at finding who is at fault because it will reduce people's self-reliance at resolving conflicts.

Suppose I break my collar bone riding my bike down a mountain. That's a totally avoidable state of self; people really shouldn't be doing 60mph without adequate protective equipment. Should I be turned away at the hospital?

They turn away those patients from some operations because it’s more dangerous dm for the patients in operation and recovery. If the danger outweighs the potential benefit, why do the surgery?

It's in part more dangerous in operation because the surgeons have not trained to operate on bodies in that condition. In part, because they refuse to operate on bodies in that condition, living or dead.

This is self-fulfilling. Of course people who are large enough that surgeons chose not to operate on them have worse health outcomes. They will also get fewer interventions that are less invasive, because practitioners won't want to take the risk that the intervention goes bad and the patient needs surgery, because surgeons won't operate.

Of course people who are large enough that every interaction with the medical system involves an irrelevant discussion of weight and diabetes despite a lack of diabetes symptoms will avoid interacting with the medical system, because it's tedious. (sometimes a discussion of weight is relevant, but often times it really isn't)

It’s more dangerous because it takes more time, nurses have to manually hold back hunks of flesh, visceral fat blocks the view of key veins/nerves/arteries, more anesthesia is required, and really everything else. Moreover recovery from surgery is worse and more complicated.

They don't turn them away because "they don't know how to operate on them" they turn them away because many surgical procedures on obese patients are well studied to have negative outcomes and risks for obese patients that do not justify the procedure. There is no polite way to say "you are too obese to undergo this procedure" using a modern framework of body acceptance, and that is a problem with the body acceptance framework, not the limitations of modern medicine.

> There is no polite way to say "you are too obese to undergo this procedure"

There is, actually, and it involves compassion. And then there's what actually happens: I've been in the other room and heard a friend get literally yelled at by a doctor for their body weight, and heard many similar stories second hand. The verbal abuse that patients endure is inexcusable, and highly counterproductive.

Titles are often determined by the editor, not the author of the piece, and the direction of the change is almost uniformly "clickbaity".

I don't care which part of the garbage entity known as vice is responsible, vice and all its garbage producers are still garbage.

Doing the spiderman-points-the-finger at editor or whatever - who cares. Just stop reading vice.

I generally don't read Vice, but I saw some of their videos from the Ukrainian war and they were genuinely good. If you want to give them a chance, I would recommend this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhBfNDVs-PY

their videos on ukraine are heavily emotional with a soundtrack to queue your emotions without giving a good understanding of whats going on with the war, just emotional coverage of how hard life is.

If you want good coverage of the war in ukraine you need to follow someone like 'Reporting from Ukraine' or 'denys davydov' on youtube. Rather than crying babushkas tugging on heartstrings to a soundtrack meant to manipulate you, you get actual breakdowns, daily, of the tactical situation in various parts of ukraine and what both sides are trying. You'll get a video roughly every day instead of these heavily edited reports, but you'll know 1000% more about the war in ukraine than watching vice.

If you want to watch actual combat footage you can go to reddit for places like /r/combatfootage or /r/ukrainewarvideoreport. But you will see people die or be mortally wounded, regularly.

If you want to spend 20 minutes feeling emotional vice is your go to. If you want to know about the war in ukraine go somewhere else. Vice is garbage.

I am a regular at the subreddits that you mention and I would say that while they cover the war from a different angle, both perspectives are valid.

Yet another, completely different angle, is the channel of Volodymyr Zolkin, who interviews Russian POWs.

>Volodymyr Zolkin, who interviews Russian POWs

I don't think you can learn anything of value from this. his channel is a PR channel where POWs will say whatever for good treatment. I think its pretty slimy and not a good representation of what russian soldiers actually think.

It's not really about validity or not. Vice doesn't make anything to inform you, it makes things to manipulate you, and they don't hide it. they're pretty slick at videography but you don't leave better informed, just manipulated. get your news somewhere else.

There are people who are more interested in the human tragedy aspects of war, not the "daily tactical breakdowns".

As someone who watches and listens to a lot of history and war content, it's quite easy to forget that behind each number there is a human being. That's why i like the War Against Humanity (companion series of the World War 2 YouTube channel)'s occasional focus into a personal story. After weeks of X deported and sent to the gas chambers, you get accustomed to it. A personal diary/recollection hits different.

Indirect discrimination (https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/pages/glossary/indirect-di...) is forbidden in quite a few countries.

The only reason I can see why would not be judged to be a case of that is that the actual discrimination happens after death, but I don’t think that will hold.

Why wouldn't it? Many laws do not apply to the dead. In Europe, a famous law that does not apply to the dead is GDPR.

I think persons stop being persons the moment they die in most countries.

However, I expect that the moment it becomes common knowledge or they tell you upfront about it, courts would rule living people who consider donating their body to science would be discriminated against.

Given that, I would think keeping it 100% a secret wouldn’t work, either, as keeping crimes/misdemeanors secret never makes them legal.

The "practical reasons" are kind of dumb. At some point a medical professional is going to encounter obese patients, and the abject refusal to prepare for that possibility greatly hinders the practicality of the training.

Except those reasons are also stupid, more than half of Americans are overweight, and you're telling me medical students don't practice on patients over 200lbs???

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