Overweight patients get less respect from physicians, according to a recent study done by a researcher at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

The study revealed that patients with higher body mass indexes (BMI) were treated with less respect by their doctors, compared to patients with lower BMIs, according to an October news release from Johns Hopkins.

Those patients who were met with a negative attitude were less inclined to get proper medical treatments, said Mary Huizinga, the leader of the study and an assistant professor of general internal medicine at Johns Hopkins.

‘Some avoided their physician because of these interactions. Many were not up to date with preventive health care screenings,’ Huizinga said. ‘I was concerned that since they were avoiding their physicians and the hurtful interactions, they were receiving sub-optimal care.’

The idea for the study came from Huizinga’s experience in running an obesity medical clinic at Vanderbilt University. She said that there were several patients that told her they were hurt by some things their physicians said or did.

In the study, Huizinga and her research team had patients and physicians fill out questionnaires about a doctor’s visit and record their perceptions of one another after the visit. Huizinga and her research team also used audiotapes to record visits with doctors and their patients.

One reason that physicians are biased could be the lack of training they receive on how to talk to patients about sensitive topics, such as weight management, in medical school, Huizinga said. She said classes on talking to obese patients would help relieve this bias.

Tom Brutsaert, an associate professor of exercise science at Syracuse University, said that his wife, an endocrinologist, received sensitivity training in medical school and was shown to be sensitive toward certain groups of people.

‘I think that medical schools need to explicitly work into their curriculum some kind of training. To me, that would be the solution,’ Brutsaert said.

Huizinga said that negative stereotypes about overweight people are also contributing factors in the way physicians treat their patients. Inferring that obese people are lazy is one of these common misconceptions, she said.

‘Physicians are human. We as humans tend to let a natural bias that exists in society shine through,’ she said.

Huizinga said she feels that doctors do not mistreat obese patients intentionally, but that their negative attitudes come from these social stigmas.

‘I don’t think providers would set out to harm somebody or do anything malicious,’ she said.

Huizinga said her team is currently looking into the long-term effects of physicians’ attitudes on their patients, both medical and emotional.

‘This relationship is a special one. For a physician to give patients advice on the topic of their weight, it needs to be in a comfortable environment,’she said.

Huizinga said that there may be more biases involved in a patient-physician relationship that have not been explored, including race, age and gender.

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Published on November 1, 2009 at 12:00 pm