Another blow taken by the medical profession, this time from a whiny you-hurt-my-fragile-feelings type. As reported by MSNBC: Doctor in trouble for calling patient obese.

So, just what is it that he said? Surely he used words you wouldn’t expect a medical doctor to say! Well, actually, what the whole story boils down to is that this doctor had a complaint filed against him for using the term ‘obese’ to describe the medical condition a woman had. She was, well, obese.

I told a fat woman she was obese, Bennett says. I tried to get her attention. I told her, ‘You need to get on a program, join a group of like-minded people and peel off the weight that is going to kill you.'”

So, this doctor is trying to do his job and tell this woman what her situation is, and even tries to convince her that fixing the problem could save her life. And he didn’t even say “hey, you’re a fattie who needs to put the fork down before you drop dead when your heart explodes”, which, of course, would have been worthy of a complaint.

Instead of insulting her, he tells the simple truth after he diagnoses her medical condition. He tells her what it is without beating around the bush and resorting to euphemisms that de-emphasize her condition, and she’s offended? The doctor didn’t make her obese. If she’s offended, she ought to be offended by the person who made her fat.

As more complaints like this are taken seriously, less people are going to want to go into the medical profession. As we know, there are already some medical specialties that are harder and harder to find practitioners of. This really doesn’t help.

What would help is for people to stop whining.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 24th, 2005 at 18:10 by Michael G. and is filed under National. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.