June 15, 2023 — BMI seems to be everyone’s favorite target for abuse these days. Depending on whom you listen to, it’s racist, sexist, useless, or useful. Nobody really stands up for it, except as an simple, objective measure of weight for height. Now, the AMA decided to caution doctors about the misuse of BMI as a surrogate for […]
June 6, 2022 — It’s great sport or a great folly. Body mass index – BMI – is a simple measure and an easy target for so many people. It saves many people for many reasons from having to think about obesity. Clinicians who don’t want to think too hard about obesity might use BMI, mistakenly, all by itself, […]
December 11, 2017 — Maybe it’s progress. Five years ago social media was full of explicitly hateful fat-shaming content. More often than not, complaints fell on deaf ears. But Friday, we learned that Google now considers merely asking about the word fat to be distasteful and offensive. Google Surveys will no longer ask people what they think about the […]
June 14, 2017 — Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American Medical Association House of Delegates, AMA stood up for respecting patients with obesity. AMA resolved to encourage respectful language and respectful accommodations in patient care for people with obesity. Obesity Action Coalition President and CEO Joe Nadglowski praised this action, saying: This news is important. AMA has […]
April 28, 2017 — People living with obesity find themselves swimming in a vast sea of weight bias. Obesity clinicians and researchers see it all the time. Knowing how to drain it away is hard because everyone has an opinion. But not many people have empiric evidence. At the Canadian Obesity Summit this week, Sarah Nutter and Angela Alberga presented […]
August 12, 2016 — UThree years after the AMA decided that obesity is a chronic disease, have we seen progress in addressing obesity? Earlier this year, Arya Sharma commented that “The U.S. has made remarkable progress in policy recognition of obesity as a disease.” In a new paper to be published in Endocrinology and Metabolism Clinics, Ted Kyle, Emily […]
May 1, 2016 — We are approaching the third anniversary of the American Medical Association finally recognizing that obesity is a complex, chronic disease. Some progress has come in addressing the disease, but it is frustratingly slow. Why? Scott Kahan and Tracy Zvenyach have published a thoughtful new commentary in Current Obesity Reports and they identify six factors that are slowing the acceptance […]
July 26, 2015 — It’s been two years since the American Medical Association (AMA) declared that obesity a disease that merits medical attention. What has been the impact on thinking? The answer depends upon where you look and who you ask. It’s fairly clear that the general public hasn’t shifted to viewing obesity primarily as a medical problem. ConscienHealth and […]
March 23, 2014 — Obesity discrimination poses growing risks for employers that target obesity in their employment practices. The Risk and Compliance Journal of the Wall Street Journal identified three factors contributing to the increasing risk: Recognition as a disease by the American Medical Association has markedly increased the risks for employers to be sued for workplace discrimination. Previously […]
July 24, 2013 — More than a month has passed since the AMA decision accepting obesity as a disease, and the media is still full of reports on the subject. Folks seem to be going through a grieving process as they let go of beliefs about obesity that must have given them comfort. Every stage of the classic grief […]
