Identifying other people as something they're not.

[Fatorthin]

This happened to me recently, and I still feel disturbed by it. I landed in Accident and Emergency due to a health crisis that was very probably weight-related. I ended up being seen by a senior doctor - a consultant. In the discussion about what might have caused the health crisis, I said to the consultant that I realised that I was overweight... (in fact I'm well into the obese range and that is quite obvious to anyone who sees me, and of course to me). The consultant immediately interrupted me and told me that I was not overweight. They then repeated that. They even used the word "thin". I was speechless. When they told me that I was not overweight, I felt confused (it made no sense) and I also lost trust in that doctor. How can you trust somebody who says something so obviously untrue to you, especially when acknowledging that the obesity might well have caused or contributed to the health incident was so necessary? Where does the patient go from there? Afterwards, I started to wonder whether this was an extension of doctors being told to accept a patient's gender identity as fact. Have they now moved to accepting (or pretending to accept) everything a patient chooses to believe about themselves? And then gone from there to anticipating what a patient would like to believe about themselves?

So you think a Dr telling you aren’t what you say you are is evidence of years of training that instructs staff to accept what patients say. Is this going to be like one of those Thoughts for the Day when they say “and that’s a bit like Jesus”. Except this going to be “and that’s what it’s like when you tell someone who ‘knows inside’ they’re a woman that they are a man”.

I wonder how (if?) they treat psychosis. Very bizarre.

But you said you were overweight so how is he telling you what you think you are by saying you are not?

Possibly he was trying to say that whatever you went to A&E for was not connected to your weight. So why DID you go?

It's very bizarre. I almost think the NHS is capable of accidentally indoctrinating this consultant into a kind of reality-blind body positivity. After all, we have the example of a male doctor who claims that he is a biological woman, as the result of reality-blind gender ideology, and who appears blind to how that compromises his performance as a doctor.
I wonder whether the consultant was obese and they were attempting to perform their own self-acceptance? But even taking that into account, the experience sounds so unlikely that I wonder whether there could have been a misunderstanding somewhere along the line?

My own NHS experience of INTENSELY STUPID perversions of respectful acceptance of patients' identities is the time I gave blood and was chatting blood groups with a nurse. He said my blood group was "extremely popular", meaning that lots of people had it. When I queried the odd wording, he explained that they weren't allowed to call it "common" in case people found that insulting!!??!!

OP you might find this episode of Gender a Wider Lens with Wesley Yang interesting. It’s v US focused but definitely thought provoking

Could it have been a bit of profoundly misplaced banter - like when checkout assistants do the joke flattery of wanting to ID you for alcohol even if you are clearly in your 60s?

It’s seems a strange thing to say, was the doctor more overweight than you? Or were you crying and distressed and he/she wanted to make you feel better?
Or alternatively they are used to seeing vastly and enormously fatter people and have a very different benchmark for thin?

I went through a phase of seeing fat people as very healthy and full of life because I had worked in palliative care for a long time and was used to end of life cachexia. It might be a different viewpoint because of their experiences.

I told the doctor I knew I was overweight, and yes, they didn't agree with me. That's why I suspect this was a level deeper. They knew that I didn't want to be fat (on the basis that no-one does), and told me what I wanted to hear.

Possibly, but when you're a consultant and advising a patient?

@MyThreeWords That's somewhat worrying. Why are we deemed to be so fragile that language has to be twisted for us? I find the American obsession with people "passing" quite frustrating - and it's arrived in the UK now.

any chance he was being “funny” (otherwise known as rude), or being sarcastic?
I’m in the camp of thinking some (strong emphasis on some) medics are very peculiar indeed.

It is without doubt an odd thing to say. Having spent most of my career trying to pick my words carefully in order to be clear but not offend patients when I discussed the risks posed by their weight I used to love it when someone said something like "I know my weight is a problem." It made my life so much easier if someone made it obvious that they recognised that they were overweight and that it did have an impact on their health so I can't imagine ever disabusing someone of that idea (assuming it was true of course.)
That said, you can get your perception skewed with time. Not long before I retired I remember in our pre theatre briefing one day being asked if I wanted to use a piece of bariatric equipment for a particular patient and I replied "No, we won't need it. She's not that big. BMI is only 35." Then I stopped myself and thought "Did I really just say that? Did I actually use the words "only" and "35" in the same sentence?!" But over the course of my career the average weight of patients has risen a great deal, and we have got much more used to managing it, so whereas anaesthetising someone with a BMI of 35 would have been unusual and would have really stressed me say, 25 years ago, it was pretty much a daily occurence by the time I retired a few years ago. So I expect I probably did get used to it and reset my expectations somewhat, but I still can't imagine telling someone with a BMI of 40 that they were quite slim, and I can't think of any of my colleagues who would either. No idea why your doctor said that OP, but in my experience it isn't the norm.

Well how did the rest of the conversation go exactly? It's understandably bizarre that you would be talking about the cause of your health crisis and you've mentioned your weight and that a doctor has not only said you're not overweight but described you as thin, which I've never heard from a doctor tbh, they'll usually just say it you're a healthy or not healthy weight. If you've got a high BMI did you not ask them to clarify or if they were looking at the wrong patient data?

I find it hard to believe your “extremely truthful story” because of my own experiences with a sister with an eating disorder. She would claim to weigh a certain amount / have a certain BMI, despite being so obviously underweight that it was seriously jeopardising her health. Even after being admitted to hospital because of her eating disorder.

I am truly sorry if I am wrong, but I genuinely believe you want us to say that a doctor would tell you that you were quite thin even when you are overweight so that you can dismiss what you were told and keep believing that you actually are overweight.

I think that's theoretically possible, yes, though it would be very unprofessional in the circumstances, and in front of a more junior colleague too. If that was it, I didn't pick up on it at the time.

They didn't have my BMI, as we were in Accident and Emergency. But I was lying on a trolley bed in front of them and they would of course have seen that I was very overweight.

I think some people have such a negative association with words like "overweight" or "fat" that they struggle to talk normally about weight.

(See the ever charmless:

"I'm overweight"
"No you're not, you're beautiful"

As if the things were mutually exclusive.)

Really weird from a doctor though.

Short of taking and attaching a photo... I am trying to lose weight, but it's going very slowly and I've got a long way to go until I reach an "overweight" BMI.

I don't want to get personal, but it's true that the doctor was not thin. Certainly a lot less overweight than I am though.

I heard a doctor on the radio correcting a interviewer recently. When the interviewer said something like 'the person is obese' he was corrected to 'the person has obesity'. He went on to use the qualifier that you wouldn't say 'a person is cancer'. It's to.do with the recognition of obesity as a disease. Could you experience of language policing be along the same vein?

So...how did the rest of the conversation go? You know your BMI. Did you challenge the doctor on why they were calling you "thin" when you're apparently very evidently obese or are we all supposed to just guess why they did it? Or as PP said was the condition you presented with something irrelevant to your weight? If not, and the Dr said definitely can't be your weight as you're so thin, what risk factors for they advise caused it?
It's odd to start a thread where you aren't really giving anyone any info and expect peopl to draw conclusions out of thin air.

Well PP did ask for your height and weight earlier in view of it being easier to fall into a higher BMI category at a lower weight for shorter people which may be relevant

Not the point of the thread but it's depressing how many posters have assumed the doctor is a man 🤦‍♀️

I was asking for thoughts on here because I don't know why the doctor said that to me. I could only speculate. As I've said, I told the doctor that I was aware that I was overweight, and that fact was in any event completely obvious. There is no possibility that the doctor didn't think that I was overweight. The likely but not certain cause of the incident is, as I already knew, weight-related. The doctor didn't mention that, no. At the end of the day they are not my GP, and no GP has ever suggested that I'm not overweight.