Wednesday, April 07, 2010

Health Care for the Obese

A new study published today reports that overweight and obese patients get the same or better quality of health care than "normal" weight patients.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania say they looked at quality of care across eight performance measures among Medicare and VA patients, and found no difference in the kinds of treatments doctors prescribed for obese and non-obese patients.

According to a s tory on MedPage Today, "Performance measures included diabetes care management (such as lipid and HbA1c monitoring and eye tests), pneumococcal vaccination, influenza vaccination, screening mammography, colorectal cancer screening, and cervical cancer screening." The story goes on to quote one of the researchers commenting that while doctors do "harbor negative attitudes" toward heavier patients, that prejudice doesn't affect the quality of care delivered.

I think this is a pretty grandiose conclusion to draw from such a limited study, and the researchers themselves cautioned against extrapolating these results too broadly. To me, the study raises some interesting questions: Are doctors more tolerant of overweight vets and/or poorer patients? Is "quality of care" strictly a function of which treatments are recommended?

I don't think so. I wonder what the patients would have to say about the quality of care they received--not just the treatment recommendations (which are of course important) but the relationship they had with their docs, and how it affects their long-term care. I wonder whether these two populations typically have long-term relationships with the same doctor, or whether they often see a revolving cast of medical providers, and whether that might make doctors react differently to them than to patients they see regularly.

Thoughts?

Tuesday, April 06, 2010

Warning: The Images You Are About to See May Be Damaging to Your Health



I'm a big fan of Jezebel, but I think they've got it wrong this morning. In a post discussing a recent editorial in the Daily Mail by grieving mother Rosalind Ponomarenko-Jones, whose 19-year-old daughter died of anorexia, Margaret Hartmann argues against the notion of labeling photos of celebrity "twiglets" when they get too thin.

Ponomarenko-Jones argues against the current appearance-driven culture, which calls out celebrities not for achievements but for appearance. And "calls out" is the right expression, since we're all familiar with the standard scary-skinny-celebrity story these days: Publish a photo of a woman so emaciated that it's painful to look at her, along with a headline that screams a fake concern for her well-being. The whole exercise feels prurient and voyeuristic.

Hartmann centers her argument on the logistics and legality of the question: How would we determine when a celeb is "too thin"? How would we know when to label an image and when not to? It's a valid point. And before commenters jump on me for this, I acknowledge that you can't tell whether someone has an eating disorder just by looking at her. Some people are naturally skinny, and there are other reasons (other illnesses) for gauntness.

But Ponomarenko-Jones has the moral high ground here, and I wish there were a way to honor the spirit of her request. Because we (and by "we" I mean the media) don't go around publishing photos of, say, recent cancer victims, who may be every bit as scarily skinny as an actress in the grip of anorexia. Yet magazines and websites are full of images of "twiglets," young women so thin you can see the shape of their femurs. Why is it OK to publish these images and not, say, images of Farah Fawcett as she lay dying of cancer?

It comes down to our blindness to eating disorders as "real" diseases. We would cringe at the idea of violating Fawcett's privacy in that way. Yet the young celebrities who walk so scary-skinny among us are dying of an illness, too, an illness that will kill them as surely as cancer killed Fawcett. The difference is that with treatment, many of these women can recover; for Fawcett and many other cancer victims, alas, treatment did not save their lives.


And of course treatment won't always help with eating disorders, either. But the point here is that instead of parading these images as models for women--whether this is openly acknowledged or not--we should label them for what they are: images of the gravely ill, who are struggling with their own terrible reality and heart-breaking health battles.


Jezebel got it wrong. The real shanda (as my grandmother would have said) is that we pretend there's no such thing as too thin.