In keeping with the media’s broader and long-running effort to destigmatize obesity, NPR reported sympathetically in December that some doctors are refusing to talk about the health risks of obesity with their overweight patients, claiming that attending to the obesity of these patients leads to “misdiagnoses.”
The story begins with an account of a Seattle woman who complains that when she needed surgery for a torn ligament in her thumb, the surgeon gave her “unsolicited advice” to lose weight. The surgeon reasoned, she said, that her obesity could be a causal factor in her injury, which the patient even admitted “could be true.” (And medical evidence supports the surgeon’s perspective.)
But rather than accept the potentially useful insights of the surgeon, the Seattle woman was outraged that her obesity would be made an object of medical interest.
Best practice in the business of primary-care doctoring involves plenty of what NPR and the woke doctors they interviewed for the piece call “unsolicited advice.” Much of the useful medical advice doctors give is “unsolicited.” Patients typically do not know the epidemiology of their symptoms, and they are also typically uninformed about how to recognize problematic health issues before symptoms begin.
If Bob is diagnosed with skin cancer after spending many summers shirtless and hatless with no sunblock, his doctor does well to give him the “unsolicited advice” to start either wearing shirts and hats more often or to introduce himself to sunscreen. If the doctor does not do this, he is
