The AMA Declares Obesity a Disease

[Content Note: Fat hatred; eliminationism.]

Yesterday, the American Medical Associated voted to declare obesity a disease, "a move that effectively defines 78 million American adults and 12 million children as having a medical condition requiring treatment."

The nation's leading physicians organization took the vote after debating whether the action would do more to help affected patients get useful treatment or would further stigmatize a condition with many causes and few easy fixes.

In the end, members of the AMA's House of Delegates rejected cautionary advice from their own experts and extended the new status to a condition that affects more than one-third of adults and 17% of children in the United States.

Emphasis mine.

This reprehensible decision will make fat people's visits with doctors, which are already frequently fraught with fat-shaming, sizest refusal of treatment, and attributing to fat all manner of life-threatening conditions not solved by weight loss, even more contentious. This reprehensible decision will not improve fat people's healthcare. This reprehensible decision will only entrench fat hatred in the medical community and serve as another disincentive to fat people seeking/needing medical care.

There are not sufficient words to express my rage, my sadness, my fear, my contempt.

I am not a problem to be solved. My body is not a disease to be cured. I cannot overcome my very physiology and make my body do something that it is simply unable to do. The only "cure" for my "disease" is to be a person I am not and cannot be.

This is eliminationist garbage. Being perpetrated by the American Medical Association.

* * *

Marilyn Wann has started a petition asking the AMA to reverse their decision. Go here to sign it.

See also:

Living ~400lbs: Why I Think Declaring Obesity a Disease Is Harmful.

Kath: I Am Not a Disease.

Ragen: AMA Says Obesity Is a Disease.