Air date: February 19, 2012

Host: Jeremy Shere, PhD

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Primary Care segments are presented
by IU Health Physicians.

So let’s say you’re a primary care doctor, and a big part of your job is counseling patients about weight loss. Lots of your patients could stand to lose a few pounds; some need to lose a lot. Now, should it, or does it matter, how much you weigh?

That’s what Johns Hopkins public health researcher Sara Bleich wanted to know. So she surveyed around 500 docs.

"And the one sentence synopsis of what we found is that basically if you’re a normal weight doc and we compare you to an overweight or obese physician, the normal weight docs are more likely to provide recommended obesity care and they’re more to report feeling comfortable doing so."

And if you’re an overweight or obese doctor, you’re less likely to counsel obesity care. Maybe because if you’re heavy, you don’t feel confident advising patients about weight. Or, maybe you don’t see being overweight as a problem in the first place.

"It’s reasonable that if a patient walks into a doctor’s office and that patient looks like the doctor and the doctor says to himself, 'well, I don’t have a problem with my weight, therefore the patient doesn’t have a problem.'"

But, of course, the patient does have a problem, as does the doc. And as do we all. Because, for one thing, it’s worrisome that doctors are providing different levels of care based on their weight. And it’s even more troubling that most doctors, whatever they weight, aren’t very good about diagnosing obesity. One solution, Bleich says, is to focus on doctors’ wellbeing.

"We know that docs generally have higher rates of depression, substance abuse and stress in general, and so if we can think about ways of improving their wellbeing by targeting those areas and improving diet and physical activity, that may have the indirect effect of improving the care they provide their patients."

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I’m Jeremy Shere.

Additional Resources:

• From Time Magazine, Fat Doctors Are Less Likely to Help Patients Lose Weight.