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Obese patients (as I was) often experience the negative consequences of so called fat shaming. It is important that all health care professionals are aware of their personal countertransference reactions during interaction with their patients, whether they are obese, look like a smoker, an alcoholic or drug addict. Feeling stigmatized, especially by health care professionals can, as the author illustrated, literally be killing. At the other hand, stigmatizing (a natural human characteristic) is a way of social pressure, which can also be important to prevent unhealthy consumer behaviour. It can hold back people to overconsume comfortable chairs (sedentary behaviour) and ultra-processed food, which are the main (not the only) causes of the obesity pandemic.
Therefore, it is important as a society to stigmatize a little bit, but not too much.
If we completely stop fat shaming most probably more people will develop obesity. Health care professionals should (during their medical training) become aware of their own countertransference reactions to others in relation to lifestyle related physical and mental diseases or social problems. In addition they should develop a sensitive ‘stigma-antenna’ to detect a too large degree of stigmatizing in society, and they should learn how then to act in order to reduce this. With his opinion paper the author nicely showed how you can act.
Fat shaming: a little bit is okay, but not too much.
Dear Editor,
Obese patients (as I was) often experience the negative consequences of so called fat shaming. It is important that all health care professionals are aware of their personal countertransference reactions during interaction with their patients, whether they are obese, look like a smoker, an alcoholic or drug addict. Feeling stigmatized, especially by health care professionals can, as the author illustrated, literally be killing. At the other hand, stigmatizing (a natural human characteristic) is a way of social pressure, which can also be important to prevent unhealthy consumer behaviour. It can hold back people to overconsume comfortable chairs (sedentary behaviour) and ultra-processed food, which are the main (not the only) causes of the obesity pandemic.
Therefore, it is important as a society to stigmatize a little bit, but not too much.
If we completely stop fat shaming most probably more people will develop obesity. Health care professionals should (during their medical training) become aware of their own countertransference reactions to others in relation to lifestyle related physical and mental diseases or social problems. In addition they should develop a sensitive ‘stigma-antenna’ to detect a too large degree of stigmatizing in society, and they should learn how then to act in order to reduce this. With his opinion paper the author nicely showed how you can act.
Competing interests: No competing interests