PC doctors harm your health
Political correctness and medicine don't go well together.
From doctors commenting in the press about how women who wear clothes that cover them fully for religious reasons are putting themselves at significant risk of vitamin D deficiency, to schools sending letters home to parents telling them their kids are overweight, the public often find these sorts of interventions offensive and complaints inevitably follow.
Yet for doctors to do their jobs properly and give patients the best possible health advice, they must wave political correctness goodbye and accept that the truth may sometimes hurt - and indeed, may offend - but is in the best interests of the patient.
During a consultation, doctors will often not raise the most obvious health issues their patients have, such as sexual problems or obesity, out of embarrassment or out of fear of upsetting them. Certainly, many medics have never been properly trained in how to go about these tasks.
So, as an extra incentive from next year, GPs will receive a bonus payment for every clinically obese patient they advise to lose weight. The plan is a desperate attempt to slow the climbing rate of obesity in Britain, which is threatening to overwhelm the NHS with the high levels of morbidity it causes.
Doctors will be instructed to be more forward in offering weight- loss advice, and new guidelines place further emphasis on the need for health workers and local authorities to stop children and adults becoming overweight.
This does rather contradict media efforts to persuade the Government to include body-confidence classes in schools. These would tell children that people come in all shapes and sizes, all of which are acceptable and nothing to be ashamed of. But being overweight does come with a huge array of health risks and so, medically at least, is certainly not acceptable, nor should it be normalised or reinforced.
Critics have blasted the plans, claiming doctors will get richer from simply telling obese patients what they already know, and yet experience shows that this is not the case. So many people are now overweight that it is more normal to be overweight than not, and many patients are now unaware that they have a weight problem at all. Experiments in which members of the public are asked to rate photos of people as normal or overweight consistently prove this.
Given that experts predict more than half of adults and a quarter of children will be clinically obese by 2040, and that the number of admissions to hospitals for obesity has risen tenfold in the past decade, it really is time we stopped being quite so precious about these sorts of issues.
If someone is putting themself at a serious health risk then they should expect their doctor to tell them so. It is our job, after all, and we are serving no useful function whatsoever by not doing so.
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