In this episode of Suspending Disbelief…
First-year UCLA Medical School students are now required to learn (be programmed) that it’s “proven that weight loss is a useless, hopeless endeavor.” It gets far worse and inherently more dangerous.
A syllabus from the medical school’s “Structural Racism and Health Equity” class includes an article by Marquisele Mercedes titled “No Health, No Care: The Big Fat Loophole in the Hippocratic Oath,” which declares, among other fallacies, “Fatphobia is medicine’s status quo.”
It is proven that weight loss is a useless, hopeless endeavor. You are unlikely to lose weight in any permanent way and highly likely to open yourself to the myriad risks associated with weight cycling. The relationship between weight and health is also muddy.
Here’s a portion of the “far worse and inherently more dangerous” part:
Medical fatphobia refers to the specific ways that hatred and denigration of fatness manifest within medicine and the fields that medicine influences, like public health. It is the reason many fat people likely didn’t get or know to ask to have their COVID-19 vaccine administered with an appropriate-length needle…
Mainstream writing on fatphobia usually gives in to the myth that there is something exceptional about fatphobic violence in healthcare. That fat people, in all our corpulent clumsiness, are just more likely to stumble across the a**holes.
This is not true. It is a lie that has been actively propagated with the assistance of the many not-fat people who have shaped our collective understanding of how fatphobia operates. The truth is that fatphobia is a scientific invention.
Yeah, no.
Top physicians, including a former Harvard dean, say the required course is riddled with dangerous falsehoods. Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School and one of the world’s foremost experts on obesity, said the curriculum “promotes extensive and dangerous misinformation.” After reviewing the syllabus and several of its assigned readings, Flier wrote:
[UCLA] has centered this required course on a socialist/Marxist ideology that is totally inappropriate. As a longstanding medical educator, I found this course truly shocking.
The American Medical Association agrees.
Obesity affects more than one in three American adults, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is also associated with more than 200 co-morbidities, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and multiple types of cancer.
Despite this, there are many efforts underway to empower individuals and communities to combat obesity. The American Medical Association is committed to providing timely information on American obesity for physicians and the general public, including risk factors, research and related health issues.
Apparently, the AMA and the CDS are in on the the promotion of “dangerous information.” (Heavy sarcasm.)
The Left’s Embrace of ‘Phobia’
Liberals believe that by absurdly adding “phobia” to words, such as “Islamophobia” and “homophobia,” they freeze the opposition, as Saul Alinsky promoted in “Rules for Radicals.”
On the contrary, I’m unaware of anyone who fears Muslims (not to be confused with Islamist extremists), members of the LGBTQ community, or in this case, obesity.
Here’s more:
One required reading lists “anti-capitalist politics” as a principle of “disability justice” and attacks the evils of “ableist heteropatriarchal capitalism.” Others decry “racial capitalism,” attack “growth-centered economic theories,” and call for “moving beyond capitalism for our health.”
The essay by Mercedes “describes how weight came to be pathologized and medicalized in racialized terms” and offers guidance on “resisting entrenched fat oppression,” according to the course syllabus. Mercedes claims that “ob*sity” is a slur “used to exact violence on fat people”— particularly “Black, disabled, trans, poor fat people” — and offers a “fat ode to care” that students are instructed to analyze, taking note of which sections “most resonate with you.
This is a profoundly misguided view of obesity, a complex medical disorder with major adverse health consequences for all racial and ethnic groups,” Flier told the Free Beacon. “Promotion of these ignorant ideas to medical students without counterbalancing input from medical experts in the area is nothing less than pedagogical malpractice.
One need not be a rocket scientist— or, in this case, a medical expert on the subject at hand — to instinctively know that obesity puts unnecessary stress on an obese person’s health and overall well-being.
The Bottom Line
I’m fully aware that weight loss is a challenge. I have several friends who’ve experienced multiple periods of weight loss followed by weight gain. I empathize with every one of them. That said, the left’s blatant attempt to gaslight the uninformed public into believing weight loss is more of a danger than a potentially life-saving endeavor could not be more obscenely irresponsible.
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