What Puts The “Morbid” in Morbidity: A Call to Reform the Way we Address Weight in the Exam Room

Abstract

In 2003, U.S. Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF) made the first official recommendation that clinicians ought to “screen all adult patients for obesity and offer intensive counseling and behavioral interventions to promote sustained weight loss for obese adults.”13 Since then, number of patients who meet the clinical definition of overweight or obese has continued to increase. Indeed, the most recent statistics show that 80% of adults and 1/3 of children are now classified as overweight or obese and weight counseling is therefore likely to be experienced by most patients in the exam room. This essay is a commentary on medicine’s history with bias against overweight individuals and why the current approach to weight management is harmful instead of helpful, supported with anecdotes from my own experiences. Indeed, as a medical student whose experienced overweight-bias as both a patient and a medical trainee, and I am calling for reform in the way we have conversations about weight in the exam room because it represents an opportunity to avoid morbid consequences for a population that is being actively harmed by biased communication skills.