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Being denied the medical care you need Is an experience that can leave you traumatized, and with little faith in the health care system.
These women have had their patience tried over and over again—and it seems to be a persistent problem among doctors.
Women are being constantly misdiagnosed, their issues being discounted and explained away because they’re overweight.
It’s called medical fat-shaming, but some cases veer closer to malpractice.
Three women told their stories to Prevention, and they’re truly startling.
One woman, Catharine Carelli, slipped on the ice near her home in Michigan and broke her leg. She recounted to Prevention that the doctor who saw her refused to give her care. “He took one look at me and said, ‘I can’t help you—look at yourself, you’re so fat.’ He said, ‘Let it heal on its own, lose weight, and then I’ll replace your knee.’”
She got a second opinion, and the doctor found that she needed a metal plate and eight screws to set her broken leg.
Another woman had a blood pressure spike, and doctors told her to lose weight to fix it. Instead, she stopped taking the medication. Her blood pressure went back to normal almost instantly.
But perhaps the most shocking story is of Rebecca Hiles, who complained of breathlessness when she was 19. She was a dancer, but her breathlessness got so bad that she could barely walk. She began to cough up blood and went to the ER, where she was told that if she lost weight this wouldn’t be a problem for her.
She began to sleep sitting up so she could breathe. She vomited frequently and became incontinent. It took her five years to get a pulmonologist to order a CT scan.
She had lung cancer. The worst part was that the surgeon told her that they could have saved her lung if she’d been diagnosed five years earlier. Instead, it was so advanced that she needed it removed. Had she not gotten attention, it would have killed her.
Of course, these misdiagnoses may not always be based on weight, and some people maybe could benefit to lose weight.
But doctors have been documented to use obesity as a diagnosis without considering other options. A study done by the University of Connecticut said that weight bias has been documented not just in physicians, but in nurses, dietitians, medical students, and psychologists.
This needs to change, but until then, patients must be ready to advocate for themselves.
