Aston sought medical help after her symptoms—which included severe migraines, abdominal pain, joint dislocations, easy bruising, iron deficiency, fainting, tachycardia, and multiple injuries—began in 2015, per the New Zealand Herald. She was referred to Auckland Hospital, where a doctor accused her of causing her own illness. Because of his accusations, Aston was placed on psychiatric watch.
Research suggests women are often much more likely to be misdiagnosed than men. A 2009 study of patients with heart disease symptoms found 31.3 per cent of middle-aged women “received a mental health condition as the most certain diagnosis”, compared to just 15.6 per cent of their male counterparts. Additionally, a 2020 study found that as many as 75.2 per cent of patients with endometriosis—a painful disorder that affects the tissue of the uterus—had been misdiagnosed after they started experiencing endometriosis symptoms. Among those women, nearly 50 per cent were told they had a “mental health problem”.
Okay, but what is she supposed to do about that if the iron deficiency is preventing her from being active regardless? If she’s not even able to be sufficiently mobile because of her health problems, then if she wants to lose weight she has to deal with the health problems first. The refusal to even check anything to rule out other possible causes aside from weight is a major issue in how doctors treat fat people. Sure, there are some things that are more difficult to detect in fat people and so losing weight may help in further diagnosis in some cases, but there are plenty of things that can be detected regardless whether the person is fat or not, and yet doctors very often refuse to do any tests and simply recommend weight loss as a blanket solution. Weight loss is not an easy process, especially for someone with health issues that impact their mobility, and it isn’t a quick process either. Any issues that may have otherwise been caught early can become much bigger problems over time even if the patient manages to lose weight, and if they happen to struggle to lose that weight, for whatever reason, then that just delays discovery even more. It should be standard procedure to rule out anything else that might be causing the issue first before resorting to weight loss, and there’s no real reason not to aside from prejudice (and cost in some countries but that’s a different can of worms, and it’s not like it’s cheap to die slowly either). I’m sure that in most cases weight loss really is the solution, but it’s much faster and more efficient to rule out other stuff first than it is to rule out their weight first. It takes way less time and way less effort to screen someone for cancer than it does to lose 5 pounds, let alone 50 or 100 pounds. And if the person is for whatever reason incapable of losing weight, like if they can’t even get out of their house because of their health issues, then telling them they need to lose weight first before you’ll look into other possibilities is essentially a refusal to treat them at all.
These are the words I was looking for, thank you. How can she exercise when she can’t even walk down the driveway because she can’t breathe (because the cancer is in her fucking lungs, not because shes fat). And she did even manage to lose about 80lbs at one point but there was no change in health or symptoms and they still didn’t take her seriously.
And how do I put this? She’s not “I’m so fat I can’t walk” fat. She was wearing 2x not 20x.