Western medicine has a long history of blaming the victims of illness for their illness, attributing moral and character defects to the ill – eg, those suffering from cholera (before the mid 19th century), from physical addictions (until the mid 20th century), and from stomach ulcers (until the discovery of Helicobacter Pylori in 1982). The most recent morality campaign waged by the medical profession has been against the obese, who are assumed by many medical practitioners to be lazy, weak-willed, or worse. The medical professions urge the over-weight to diet and to exercise, and they even restrict treatment in some cases to people who are not obese. Never mind that the scientific evidence for the relationship between regular exercise and appetite is weak, and suggests in any case that the former increases the latter: so that, if anything, more exercise is likely to lead to increased weight, not to reduce it.
Now, science tells us that appetite – and hence obesity – may also be a function of one’s genes, as this article in tomorrow’s SMH reports.
SOME of the children were so fat they had been listed on the British social services ”at risk” register because it was assumed their parents were abusing them with deliberate overfeeding.
”In one case, one of the children had been taken into care,” said Stephen O’Rahilly, a world expert on the genetics of obesity at the University of Cambridge.
But then his research team discovered the problem. The obese children had a section of DNA missing in their genetic code – a fault that produced a very strong drive to eat.
Continue reading ‘Can the obese now expect an apology from the medical profession?’