Posts Tagged ‘stigmatizing language’

Refreshingly, The Guardian decided to take a stand against against weight stigma last week. They told the world in an editorial there’s too much moralizing about obesity medicines. Their editorial says: “Ever since GLP-1 agonist drugs emerged, many have argued that using them for weight loss is a sort of cop-out – an answer to […]

It will be hard to ignore: This is an election year. So our very political health secretary, RFK Jr., is making a pivot. It turns out that making polio and measles great again is not resonating well with voters. Much of the public hates his vaccine policies. On the other hand, yelling at people to […]

“Obesity, in particular, stands out as a modifiable risk factor,” says a recent article on modifiable and non-modifiable risk factors for breast cancer. Why is this phrase, so often used to define obesity, such an irritant? This is a catchphrase with a lot of history and it’s that history that is the source of friction. […]

By the end of this month, we will be seeing lists of what’s in and what’s out for the coming year. For people whose minds drift toward liver disease, we have an entry. Fatty liver is out and steatotic liver is in. NAFLD goes to the dustbin, replaced by MASLD, while MASH takes over from […]

Words matter. The language we use to describe and discuss obesity conveys and sometimes betrays our understanding of this complex, chronic disease. It betrays that understanding because our implicit biases about obesity are sometimes at odds with our explicit, rational knowledge of it. With a new paper in Gastroenterology Clinics of North America, Ted Kyle, […]

“This is a cane that’s going to help you walk. But you’re going to have to do the walk yourself.” This is how Dr. Zhaoping Li explains why she prescribes anti-obesity medicines to patients only after lifestyle changes have failed. But words like failure betray an implicit bias about obesity. They contradict the understanding of […]

If a patient is Black, health providers are more than twice as likely to put negative words in that patient’s health history. These are descriptors like hysterical, noncompliant, unpleasant, or uncooperative. Those word choices don’t suggest a good relationship with a patient. This conclusion comes from an analysis of records for 18,459 patients, published recently […]