What happens when parts of the American public-health apparatus are commandeered by ideologues pushing yet another victimization narrative? Thanks to the “Fat Justice Working Group” at the Oregon Health & Science University-Portland State University School of Public Health (SPH), we may soon have an answer.
“The purpose of the Fat Justice Working Group,” its website declares, “is to engage students, faculty and staff … in learning, activities and advocacy to reduce weight stigma and anti-fat bias in ourselves, our School and society at large.”
Beneath that word salad is a meatier agenda: “We imagine a future where public health is openly and firmly committed to ending discrimination and other oppression of people in larger bodies.”
This is sloppy thinking, directly antithetical to the principles of public health.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH), for example, defines its mission in part as “enhanc[ing] health, lengthen[ing] life, and reduc[ing] illness and disability.” By presenting obesity as an “oppress[ed]” identity category rather than a treatable medical condition, Oregon’s SPH makes this work more difficult.
We have been here before. Last year, Do No Harm catalogued efforts by the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University to downplay the adverse health consequences of obesity.
For instance, the school hosted a presentation entitled “Introduction to Weight Stigma & Weight Inclusive Care,” the purpose of which was, in part, to “promote a non-judgmental and inclusive environment for patients of all body sizes.”
Unbelievably, the presentation made the assertion that “health and well-being are achievable for all regardless of weight.” One need only read the relevant medical literature to grasp the inaccuracy of this claim.
Medical science demonstrates that obesity correlates strongly with elevated mortality. It is often, in the words of a Ghana Medical Journal article, “a major risk factor for the development of several non-communicable diseases, significant disability and premature death.”
Moreover, as Do No Harm wrote last year, obesity is not an immutable condition. In many instances, obese patients “who lose significant amounts of weight have been shown to live longer, with better quality of life.”
None of this means that men and women suffering from obesity deserve public censure or scorn. Physicians and other public-health officials should treat all patients with respect, even as they bring their expertise to bear on conditions that lead to significant medical complications.
In short, the medical establishment needs to help people struggling with obesity to make lifestyle improvements or, in some cases, to choose appropriate pharmacological or surgical interventions. Obese patients need assistance, not a team of social-justice warriors telling them that everything is okay.
Faculty and staff at Oregon’s SPH must know this. Yet the work of the Left is always and everywhere to expand the ranks of the “oppressed,” thus granting political power to those who would “rescue” them.
In medicine, this has often meant fixating on identity and compassion at the expense of patient care. Yet evidence-based medical science should not be deemphasized by those who wish primarily not to give offense.
In the normal course of things, such a tendency is often merely obnoxious. When it helps convince doctors not to tell necessary truths, however, the consequences can be deadly.
