I don't know what the fuck happened to the original post but I can't heart or reblog it so I'm reposting here. Shared by fatphobiabusters and originally written by @timidsketch
ID: tweet. Retweeted by fat doctor UK.
Reagan Chastain @dance... July 16th weight stigma and research is "higher weight people are greater risk" for a health issue getting interpreted as being higher weight causes greater risk" in studies that didn't examine causality period this is a first day of research class mistake that's ubiquitous in weight science.
4 replies, 206 retweets, 1,183 likes.
"An enormous portion of fat people are poor, which means worse healthcare.
Rates of fat people are high in certain groups like Black people and Indigenous people. These people face racism, which means racism-induced poverty, lack of opportunities, lower socioeconomic status, worse quality of healthcare, lack of access to healthcare, among a plethora of other things.
Fat people face fatphobia, a form of oppression.
This oppression causes fat people to face a wage gap, lower socioeconomic status, medical negligence, just to name a few things. There are studies that show that fat people receive worse healthcare, that doctors don't even do the same amount of tests on us because they don't want to touch our "disgusting" fat bodies.
We avoid going to doctors until the very last minute so that we won't be subjected to fatphobia in medical treatment, which means our conditions are worse when we do finally see a doctor. We are always prescribed with weight loss instead of actually being examined.
There are plenty of accounts of fat people dying with tumors because when they went to see a doctor about pain, the doctor told them it's their fault for being fat and didn't check for anything else.
When a group faces oppression, common ways to cope are things like smoking and drinking. Does the study take that into account?
When a group faces oppression, common ways to cope are things like smoking and drinking. Does the study take that into account?
On top of that, weight gain is often a symptom of a condition, not the cause of it.
And these are just the tip of the iceberg of things to consider when we hear about higher weights being correlated with certain health conditions. There are so many other factors too.
If we can understand how AIDS was mislabeled a "gay disease" when in reality being gay does not cause someone to have AIDS, then we can understand how fat people's oppression and the willful ignorance about causation vs. correlation has medicalized fatness too, another normal aspect of human diversity just like sexuality.
When someone invents a helmet and people who wear that helmet suddenly have an increase in rates of brain damage, correlation tells us that the helmets cause brain damage.
When you actually look at the whole situation, you realize that the increase in brain damage is because the people who would have died in accidents have been saved by the helmets, so the increase is from people's lives being saved by the helmets and facing non-fatal injuries rather than death. But if we stop at "helmet = more brain damage," then we never actually understand the real causation and how the helmets are effective and saving lives.
Societies that begin to allow divorce suddenly see evidence of domestic violence and unhappy relationships, so the allowance of divorce must cause unhappy marriages, right? In reality, that domestic violence and those unhappy marriages have existed the whole time. Divorce has just given people the freedom to finally leave those situations, so now we're actually getting to hear about them.
Do we see how correlation does not equal causation and that believing it does only serves to medicalize oppressed communities and actually worsen health?"
