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Resistance leads to suffering
Jan. 11th, 2012 10:37 pmChoice quote from an article on medical schools refusing donations of fat bodies:
A brief digression: the diagrams in medical and biology textbooks are not only stylized, but idealized. In the real world, there's a lot of variation in the size, shape, color, placement, and existence of organs. I'm perfectly willing to grant that we should ease students in to this by giving them the most predictable bodies possible. And that there are practical issues with extremely large bodies, in terms of the equipment required. But at some point they need to learn to deal with variety. I'm choosing my words very carefully here because while fat people may deviate farther from the model on average, fat itself is normal and something doctors need to learn to deal with. Just like they need to learn to deal with patients who become sleepy when they take sudafed or caffiene, metabolize anesthetics or pain killers faster than average, or have all the symptoms of hypothyroidism but numbers in the "normal range"- a range that was often defined by setting percentile cutoffs of the population distribution, without regard to how healthy the people in that range were. Artists can learn what the human body is supposed to look like, but doctors need to learn what it does look like.
Also, I assume everyone donating their body died of something, and whatever that was is going to be a pretty substantial deviation from the living. It can't all be trauma victims.
But wait, it gets better. That article links to a blog on the same website, titled "A final reason to lose weight" and it is even more fat shaming than you would expect based on the title.
Meanwhile I'm reading a book called Rethinking Thin (Gina Kolata). It is all about how calories in - calories out is a myth, and that our diet has far less influence over our weight then what we've been led to believe (something I firmly believe after watching my diet and exercise have no effect on my weight, and various medical treatments lead to drastic changes). It also includes the following choice sentence:
Let me remind you that the book's stated premise is that you can't diet your way thin in a permanent, sustainable, healthy way. I believe the author believes that to be true, but is unable to shake the relevant cultural programming. So when she needs some description to spice up a sentence, that's where she goes. It's really disheartening.
Donated bodies are used primarily for first-year anatomy students, who need to learn how the human body is supposed to look
A brief digression: the diagrams in medical and biology textbooks are not only stylized, but idealized. In the real world, there's a lot of variation in the size, shape, color, placement, and existence of organs. I'm perfectly willing to grant that we should ease students in to this by giving them the most predictable bodies possible. And that there are practical issues with extremely large bodies, in terms of the equipment required. But at some point they need to learn to deal with variety. I'm choosing my words very carefully here because while fat people may deviate farther from the model on average, fat itself is normal and something doctors need to learn to deal with. Just like they need to learn to deal with patients who become sleepy when they take sudafed or caffiene, metabolize anesthetics or pain killers faster than average, or have all the symptoms of hypothyroidism but numbers in the "normal range"- a range that was often defined by setting percentile cutoffs of the population distribution, without regard to how healthy the people in that range were. Artists can learn what the human body is supposed to look like, but doctors need to learn what it does look like.
Also, I assume everyone donating their body died of something, and whatever that was is going to be a pretty substantial deviation from the living. It can't all be trauma victims.
But wait, it gets better. That article links to a blog on the same website, titled "A final reason to lose weight" and it is even more fat shaming than you would expect based on the title.
Meanwhile I'm reading a book called Rethinking Thin (Gina Kolata). It is all about how calories in - calories out is a myth, and that our diet has far less influence over our weight then what we've been led to believe (something I firmly believe after watching my diet and exercise have no effect on my weight, and various medical treatments lead to drastic changes). It also includes the following choice sentence:
...Weight Watchers, where you start by stepping up to the scale to weigh in and you cringe in embarassment if your weight reveals you've had a few diet transgressions
Let me remind you that the book's stated premise is that you can't diet your way thin in a permanent, sustainable, healthy way. I believe the author believes that to be true, but is unable to shake the relevant cultural programming. So when she needs some description to spice up a sentence, that's where she goes. It's really disheartening.
