March 17, 2020 — A pandemic such as COVID-19 has a way of raising difficult issues to confront. Questions about who’s at risk also raise issues about stigma and bias. On top of that, when the pandemic overruns our capacity for healthcare, triage becomes a reality. In Italy, physicians on the frontlines of this pandemic are facing difficult decisions […]
November 19, 2019 — Bias, beliefs, and moral convictions live alongside the human capacity to rationalize just about anything. Some people see obesity as a moral failure. They see obesity treatment as a moral hazard. Others regard it as a non-issue. Merely a symptom of moral panic. But despite – or perhaps because of – all these conflicting views, […]
February 27, 2019 — Honestly, this one is hard to wrap our heads around. A new study in Health Psychology tells us that weight stigma during pregnancy and right after birth may be increasing the risk of depression, excess weight gain, and weight retention. Angela Incollingo Rodriguez was lead author on the study. Prospective Observations This prospective observational study […]
December 23, 2017 — They’re dead for now. Those godawful coercive wellness programs will be illegal on January 1, 2019, thanks to a new court ruling this week. A judge finally threw out EEOC rules that allowed companies to impose big penalties on employees who don’t step on the scale and lose weight. Some employers called them incentives. But […]
December 22, 2017 — On the subject of obesity, one way or another, it takes only seconds. Almost always, the subject of personal responsibility will claim its central role. To some people, it’s even a key tool for allocating scarce medical resources. But with a new paper in the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, Sven Ove Hansson helps us […]
