Received an email from my doctor’s office today:
“. . . Medical Group is now offering COVID-19 antibody testing for our patients, by appointment only. If you are interested in being tested, please call our office for an appointment.”
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Do you want a doctor to tell a person they're ugly and ugly people have worse health outcomes?<<<<<<<<<<<<<
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I expect you have enough critical thinking skills to understand that obesity is a clinical condition, it is now a disease, right? Is that more PC? A dr needs to discuss how a current disease of obesity impacts other health outcomes. What you are referring to is the internalization of guilt and shame. That is for your therapist to tease out on an hourly $ rate, not your clinician.
I do think my friends doctors comment was in the context of her raising her extreme anxiety about COVID. The “I’m doing so much to avoid it, what else should I do…should I take pepcid? daily Zinc? She keeps telling me she was messsaging her doctor about whatever she had read about. …Thus the docs “ people with a healthy weight do better”:seemed appropriate to me in this scenario.
Do doctors who tell their patients they are fat and should lose weight end up getting their patients to lose weight, as compared to doctors who do not do that? No? Then I hope you have enough critical thinking skills to realize that doctors shouldn’t do it. It is ineffective and counterproductive.
Doctors are paid a lot of money per minute. They shouldn’t waste minutes doing things that are not going to work. The treatment, “Tell the patient they are fat and should lose weight,” is just like any other ineffective treatment. It should be abandoned.
I wonder why you think it is so important to waste fat patients’ time in this way. Many fat patients tell stories of doctors who were so busy telling their fat patients to lose weight that they missed the actual conditions that were causing the symptoms the patients were there for.
Thank you for posting this!!!
It will be accurate at calculating BMI if you put in accurate height and weight. Whether BMI is an accurate indicator of whether you are obese is another matter, since weight alone does not distinguish between body fat and muscle or bone.
MODERATOR’S NOTE: Please move on from the discussion regarding doctors advising their patients on weight. Thank you.
A friend who is a molecular geneticist posted this helpful article today - seems current data suggests that transmission of COVID by asymptomatic patients is rare (guess they don’t count and /or sneeze) : https://www.axios.com/who-coronavirus-asymptomatic-patients-08d84e31-1846-44d8-8fe1-2343ff850764.html?fbclid=IwAR2Iu03902b-aatGeOaYB62kcyQf5F7WKnRwuqYqwrK93uXrv8xdQJQb8wU She also said that this is not a “get out of mask/social distancing free” card by any means, even though it is good news. They commented that the asymptomatic folks may actually be very mildly symptomatic- not truly asymptomatic.
But still, its good news.
I listened to what Dr. Kerkhove of the WHO had to say about asymptomatic transmission. I didn’t find it as clear as some of the news reports represent.
She did at one point say asymptomatic transmission is “very rare.” But she also talked about how some people who are described as asymptomatic actually have mild symptoms, like a mild cough.
When she said asymptomatic transmission is very rare, I couldn’t tell whether she meant to include the mildly symptomatic people who don’t recognize their mild symptoms as covid. If truly completely asymptomatic people don’t transmit covid, but people with mild headaches, aches and pains or little coughs from unrecognized covid do transmit covid, that doesn’t help us much.
They should look at how to do so in a way that can be heard and helpful and effective. My friend who has very overweight children and who herself is average weight but always feels fat has told me how doctors talk to them and she has had horrible experiences with very rude doctors at times. It isn’t just once. Imagine every doctor’s appointment they say the same general thing and not all are kind or nice. Some imply she is abusing her child and she ends up fearing a call to child services. Not an effective way to help that family. She has dreaded taking the kids to the doctor as a result and they are all hyper-sensitive to any mention of this topic. If telling people to lose weight worked, the kids would be very thin by now.
There are different ways to say the same thing and some could be heard by people like my friend. Focusing on nutrition and improving health rather than fat and losing weight would work much better. Maybe setting them up with an awesome registered dietitian to do ‘diabetes prevention’ or something would also be something that would work. But, ‘your boys are severely obese and you are killing them’ isn’t helpful (yup, she has been told that and more).
People stress eat so stressing out people over their weight is rarely going to be effective.
In my case, I have had doctors who dismissed joint pain I had because I needed to lose 10 or 15 lbs. Turned out the joint pain was not related to weight at all. Doctors often can dismiss health issues in people overweight.
Anyway, I think doctors can bring it up in a careful way but it has to be very respectful and not telling people what they obviously already know. That isn’t going to work or help the people.
MODERATOR’S NOTE: I guess people didn’t see my post #736? Please note.
I am moderating this thread because I am not participating in it.
So glad I never wasted too much time wearing a mask. I can’t remember the last time I had a runny nose, and the only sneezing I did in the last three months was from wearing a dirty mask.
Emotions are running high in parts of the south these days over mask wearing and group events. People who’ve lost loved ones in the past couple of months weren’t able to have the funerals they would have had under normal conditions. Today, for a police officer’s funeral, hundreds crammed into a church and it doesn’t appear from the photos that anyone wore a mask.
The lack of mask wearing is pretty consistent with the photos shared in social media by various sheriff and police departments showing deputies and officers standing close together and not wearing masks. These photos have been cited by some who defend their own lack of mask wearing while calling those who do fear mongering cowards (often in very vulgar language.)
In addition to the funeral today, there was a big party over the weekend to celebrate a new stadium. Comments and photos on social media indicate few, if any, masks were worn. When questions were raised by some residents, the people who attended got quite defensive and sometimes rude. Some referenced the protests as their excuse, while one young woman made “boomer” comments to her older neighbors.
More and more, I find myself agreeing with Linus: “I love mankind, it’s people I can’t stand.”
Masks really seem to work
“The Springfield-Greene County Health Department is encouraged to report that the incubation period has passed from those potentially exposed from Great Clips. No clients of either stylist nor additional coworkers contracted COVID-19 as a result. “
All wore masks
Regarding whether “asymptomatic” people actually are, or are they mildly symptomatic and just don’t acknowledge it mentally:
A hostess in a Dallas restaurant has been diagnosed with COVID after working while symptomatic. She says she “felt feverish, achy, and had SOB” but just figured it was her diabetes, therefore it didn’t occur to her that it could be COVID. And I bet if she had been asked if she had symptoms of COVID at that time, she would have answered no. In fact, her boss offered her the opportunity to leave, but she declined.
Those are not typical diabetes symptoms. Sounds like she was in denial.
And maybe others have been as well.
Just an observation…
Went to Office Depot to get a new academic planner for DD. Her online summer class has a lot of components to track. She has again started reusing her 2019-2020 planner, after having abandoning it in March when e-learning began, and she realized it ends with June. Even though it is “that time of the year” for this product, I was somewhat surprised at the excellent selection of planners they had, considering the fact that manufacturing has been supposedly slowed the past three months (earlier in parts of China). Then again, perhaps a lot of students are still feeling too unsettled and displaced to even think about purchasing school planners right now. DD is pretty fussy about planners, and we were both glad to be able to flip through and review them in person.
There were only three customers in the store. They had plenty of some generic brand of hand sanitizer for sale, but at a pretty steep price compared to what I saw in my grocery store last week.
Not sure what to make of the WHO’s report that asymptomatics are not large spreaders of COVID. More confusion.
Great news that the mask-wearing Missouri hairstylists didn’t spread covid to any customers. I’d love to know how the two of them were infected. Was there a superspreading event that infected both of them? If one infected the other, what was different about that exposure than the client exposures? Public health officials should do better with explaining what they know about how people got infected.
Maybe they went to the bathroom and touched door handles that customers didn’t touch. Maybe the credit card machine. Who knows?
Here’s the actual guidance from WHO on transmission by asymptomatic people:
So, the WHO comment about transmission from asymptomatic people is talking about people who never develop any symptoms. It’s not about pre-symptomatic people, who can pass on the disease before they get sick. It’s not about people who get mild symptoms and don’t realize they have covid. And, obviously, it’s not about people who are in denial about covid-like symptoms. Dr. Kerkhove, who made the comments that caused the stir, emphasized on Twitter, “In these data, it is impt to breakdown truly asymptomatic vs pre-symptomatic vs mildly symptomatic.”
This same report says they believe about 16% of people infected with covid never develop any symptoms. They note this is an estimate with large uncertainty.
(This is the URL to download the whole June 5 guidance. The part about asymptomatic transmission is on page 2)
https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/advice-on-the-use-of-masks-in-the-community-during-home-care-and-in-healthcare-settings-in-the-context-of-the-novel-coronavirus-(2019-ncov)-outbreak
Bottom line: Wear masks. You might have covid but not have developed symptoms yet. You could be spreading disease and not know it.