An English woman is being denied an operation to alleviate her debilitating hip pain because she is SIX POUNDS “overweight.”
Anjelica, who is 5ft 7ins and 13 stone [182 lbs.], was knocked back using the Body Mass Index system — calculated using height and weight.
This is truly beyond the pale, but let’s not forget that Sandy Szwarc has written before about actual fat people being denied joint replacements, which is every bit as awful and wrongheaded:
A 2002 study of 180 total knee replacement (TKA) procedures in the Journal of Arthroplasty looked at how body weight affected one-year outcomes and reported that “body weight did not influence adversely the outcome of TKA.”
A longer-term study following patients for an average of seven years was conducted by researchers at the Department of Orthopaedics, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, reported: “There were no significant differences in the combined percentage of good and excellent results between the two groups. On the basis of the results of this study, it is believed that weight as a factor by itself should not compromise the … results of total knee arthroplasty.”
Yet doctors still believe hip and knee replacements will be “wasted” on fat people — even to correct fucking genetic arthritis.
Anjelica Allan “can barely move” with her hip the way it is right now. Her dress size is smaller than the UK average. But she’s too fat to deserve surgery that would restore her mobility. Of course.
I just have one question before my brain breaks: if the idea is that these people should lose weight prior to being allowed the surgery, and exercise is a key component of short-term weight loss, HOW THE FUCK ARE THEY SUPPOSED TO DO THAT WHEN THEY CAN’T WALK?
I think it is time for voodoo. Whenever shit like this happens I always pray for the perps to gain 100 pounds that they can’t get rid of no matter what they do. And then get crippling arthritis that only joint replacement can alleviate. Then maybe they’ll get a clue. You are so right, Kate, this is totally about punishing someone for not being an itty-bitty take-up-no-space “lady,” this doesn’t have jackshit to do with “risk.”
Meanwhile, Beth Ditto (of Portland, Oregon!) is naked on the cover of NME. She is apparently the hottest thing in England. There must be some serious backlash a-brewin’ there in the Yewk against all this toxic lipophobia, which seems to be even worse there than it is in the U.S. Maybe Beth and her new pal Kate Moss can tag-team and argue on this woman’s behalf. It couldn’t hurt.
This breaks my heart, this outs my rage. WHAT the fuck.
This is something that always burns my ass. Denying valid medical treatment to someone just because they’re fat, never mind that there is no good, proven reason that it will be “wasted”. Hell, even if something won’t be as effective on a fat person as it will on a skinny person, if there is evidence that it will help the fat person, they should get the treatment.
And, as has been noted, if this woman can’t move, how would she be able to lose the weight? Or have a healthy life, given that exercise is a component to a healthy lifestyle?
Even using the BMI scale, that’s less than a 1 point difference (28.5 vs 27.6). Stupid NHS. Disgusting and unfair!
Please don’t miss the real significance of this story and the one that is so critical for the size acceptance community to understand what all of this is actually about:
http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2007/05/our-future.html
http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2007/05/medical-privacy-update-healthcare-for.html
But aren’t people in this country forced to lose weight in order to have surgery, also? Maybe it isn’t codified as strictly as in the British system, but it seems to me that an awful lot of people here are denied treatment based solely on doctors’ whims, which is just as bad.
And aren’t fat people already turned down for insurance at all when they apply for it in the first place, and when they do go to doctors aren’t they already denied treatment for what is ailing them until they lose weight? Maybe not all the time, but often enough that fat people often avoid doctors altogether because they’ve been abused by them so badly in the past?
While I understand the concerns advanced by Sandy, I’m not quite prepared to swallow the “socialized medicine is bad because fat people will be screwed out of care” argument, because fat people are already being screwed out of care. But we also have the added bonus of being nailed to the wall financially when we do manage to get care. Higher taxes versus being $50,000 or $100,000 or more in debt to a hospital? I’ll take the taxes, thanks.
Sandy, I’ve spent almost half my life in Canada (I’m a dual citizen), and my feelings on this are mixed. Yes, the standards and availablity of care are sometimes shockingly unacceptable — but as far as I can see, the same is true here for all but the very rich. As someone who can afford to pay for better health care here, I admit I was a little stunned when I moved to Canada and got exactly what everyone else gets — but why should I deserve anything else?
And at the end of the day, I never had any serious problems, and it was incredibly nice not to pay for routine doctor visits — even if I did pay higher taxes. Also, right after I moved back to the States, I didn’t have insurance, cut my finger badly, and had to pay 900 freakin’ dollars to have it stitched up — which involved about 7 hours in the ER, no better than it was in Toronto, I might add. Last time I cut myself like that, I got it fixed for free. And even though I didn’t have a drug plan in Canada, all of my prescriptions were way cheaper than they are here… I absolutely take your points, but I still believe universal health care is better than what we’ve got here.
Oh it’s easy. If you can’t get up and excercise, you’re expected to sit and starve until you CAN move around again. I really hate how callous the medical community is toward fat people. EVERYTHING is attributed to our weight and therefore could have been prevented if we’d just put down the 3rd cheeseburger and get up and DO something. This whole attitude just irks me to no end.
Geez, why do we even bother giving cancer patients chemo? They’ll probably just waste it by dying of cancer anyway.
Then again, chemo does cause a person to lose weight, so it can’t be bad, right?
“But aren’t people in this country forced to lose weight in order to have surgery, also?”
Meowzer, i’m not sure if you were referring to the US (where i live); i’ve had two surgeries and was not required to lose weight for them.
However, i have been told by several doctors that my endometriosis would just miraculously go away if i lost weight. Some of those doctors refused to offer any treatment because of my weight (~220 pounds). I had to go through about a dozen before i found one that would help; even then, he did it grudgingly and didn’t believe there was anything wrong with me.
And yes, my woes with the medical profession have caused me to have little to nothing to do with them any more.
Some cancer treatments can actually cause you to gain weight, I believe. I read a blog post a while back from a woman who was undergoing cancer treatment, she’d gained some weight as a side effect, and was very distressed to read an article that said people who gain weight have a bigger chance of the cancer coming back. It was one of those scare articles based on flimsy data-dredging, like the one about women who gain 7lbs will find themselves living in a Roman Polanski film if they get pregnant again while they’re “fat”. Completely unnecessary.
Refusing people surgery or treatment because they’re fat is repugnant. I don’t care how someone got sick or injured, they still deserve basic human rights including adequate medical care. They could have drunk a whole bottle of bourbon then smashed themselves and others up driving drunk, but it would be just as appalling for them to be turned away from the hospital. What about that whole Hippocratic Oath thing? Physician, heal thyself.
Kate, I agree with you that socialised medicine is generally good, though often badly administered. I live in Australia where we do have it, although the conservative government of the past 13 years has systematically been dismantling it, trying to head for a user-pays US-style system. If private health insurers could be required to not discriminate on the basis of weight, etc, and required to have low-cost or government-supported programs for the poor, I could see more reason in it, but then it’s basically like outsourced socialised health care anyway. My uncle had a kidney transplant and it ended up costing him a total of $3000. No way would he have been able to afford it in the USA.
I just read that Steve Guilliard, a pioneering progressive blogger suffering from kidney failure, had been refused a kidney transplant until he lost weight. He passed away yesterday at age 41. Kate, how many times can I type “FUCKING FUCKSTICKS” before your server melts?
“While I understand the concerns advanced by Sandy, I’m not quite prepared to swallow the “socialized medicine is bad because fat people will be screwed out of care” argument, because fat people are already being screwed out of care.”
Indeed, you’re right not to swallow that argument. As a fat person in the UK, I can get most, if not all, of the treatment that anyone else can get. (Not all areas of the UK are rationing with rules on disallowing fat people surgery.)
In the US, however, there is a huge question mark over whether I’d even be able to get insurance in the first place. Maybe I’d get onto a group plan through my employer, maybe I’d be lucky. But I’ve heard of so many people having huge difficulty finding insurance that leaves them with enough money to live on; fat people because of being fat, and thin people because of having past history of illness.
The UK isn’t perfect, and fatphobia is rampant, but I still get the impression that I have a far better chance of getting healthcare here in the UK than I would in an insurance-based system like the US.
Don’t use the fatphobic attitudes of some parts of the UK as an excuse not to go for universal healthcare, the situation in the UK is an argument for universal healthcare, but it’s also an argument for setting it up correctly. From the looks of how other countries run their universal healthcare systems, the UK does not have it set up correctly.
I’m from the UK, and I love the NHS. I’m absolutely certain that without it I would be iller and poorer.
However, it has its flaws. As Sharon mentioned , services vary in different areas of the UK.
Socialised medicine does mean that some people have a sense that it’s their money funding other people’s healthcare, and therefore they feel that have the right judge whether or not those people deserve that healthcare. That manifests itself in this kind of fat phobia, but also in calls to deny treatment to alcoholics and smokers. Laments about the waste of tax payers’ money are a favourite cry of the tabloids, and are often used as an excuse to support all kinds of prejudice.
The NHS doesn’t cause fat phobia, but fat phobia, in cases like this, does get in the way of the NHS being the wonderful helpful thing it can and should be.