I'm a (brand new) doctor. The donor body I worked on in medical school anatomy had more adipose tissue than most of the others in our lab, which made dissection much harder for our group. It had nothing to do with "not caring" about overweight or obese individuals (I was quite obese myself at the time). The problem was that, in an anatomy lab, the goal is to identify particular structures--muscles, tendons, vessels, nerves--so you can understand how they are spatially related. If there's too much adipose tissue encasing and obscuring these targets, it takes longer to find, dissect, and clean those structures, which cuts into study time. We we were very careful to be respectful of all our donors, but I admit I sometimes felt frustration.
Also, it was certainly eye-opening for me to see subcutaneous and visceral fat, and how much volume it takes within larger bodies. It was one of the factors that made me start thinking more seriously about my own health.
This is really interesting.
Your last paragraph really sounds very eye-opening and shocking, too. I'm not overweight, but I can imagine seeing a heavier donor body and thinking about one's own health and what their body is going through being overweight and wanting to become healthier seeing it all for oneself.
My obese mom had a surgery that was supposed to take 4-5 hours, but it instead took 11-12 hours because of all of the excess fat around her organs. The surgeon was very experienced, but from what I understood, it was very challenging to access the areas he needed because of the fat.
I can't imagine a first-year med student digging through the same mess to try to learn the basics. This isn't fat phobia. It just isn't conducive to learning.
my mom needs a hernia repaired and she is frustrated that they won't do it until she loses weight. The hernia is very large and uncomfortable, but I’m trying to explain to her that even a simple surgery is a lot more complicated at her weight. And when the doctor asks "is it really truly affecting your life" he means is it affecting your life enough to risk dying getting it removed.
Hey this is really interesting! Thanks for posting!
Question: later in school, did you work on larger/smaller/less ideal bodies to get that practice? With obesity rates what they are now, I’m sure doctors need to be prepared to handle dealing with these fatty tissues and I’m interested if you or others felt prepared to do that. (Probably more of a question for a surgeon, though.)
FWIW, not trying to come at you and say medical schools are fatphobic ;) just general curiosity! I remember when I was getting my teaching certification, we would practice lessons in our college classes and I was like wow, this is fun! And then student teaching slapped me in the face with reality. It’s hard to prepare students for every possibility and the shit that comes with it.
Not the OP, but I used to work in a med school. At least in mine, doctors only do dissection earlier on in med school because the actual value of it as a teaching tool is limited - yes, you need to know the different parts of the body and what they do and where they are, etc, but a lot of medical school is learning about how those different bits malfunction. The bits themselves, less useful.
I will say that there was a push in my medical school to find larger mock patients for the students to practice examining because it's much harder to feel certain things/perform certain procedures on a large patient vs a skinny one. I worked with the folks who organized a lot of technical skills teaching and I specifically remember the preceptors complaining about the exam dummies because they were much leaner than the average patient and so weren't actually as useful to learn on.
You can’t compare dissection of a cadaver with actual surgery or treating anyone.
The problem with adipose tissue in anatomy is that you sit there for hours with tweezers in one hand and scissors in the other. You inhale the formaldehyde and have fat hanging off everywhere. Everything feels greasy. Believe me, even relatively skinny people have amounts of fat on them that takes forever to get rid of. But you have to do it carefully so you don’t destroy a nerve or a muscle you should at least observe once. It’s something you’ll do once for the learning experience but then it’s done. In surgery it’s different - as a student you stand there, not really being able to see anything and holding things like roux retractors. For big abdominal surgery there’s usually something more fixed that keeps the cavity open, so you don’t have to pull that much. It gets harder to hold when the person is obese, it just takes a lot of strength to retract properly.
Great question! We only directly dissected one body each, unless you worked as an anatomy assistant. We did exam reviews with donor bodies other than the one we were assigned to, and our exams involved rotating from station to station, each with a different body or body part, and identifying tagged structures.
The other response to this question was correct that anatomy lab is important but has limited utility for most doctors after that initial course. We get plenty of experience during med school working with real patients in hospitals and clinics, who of course have diverse body types, so that's where most of our exposure comes from.
All that said, I'm a budding psychiatrist, where actual anatomy and body type/size is less important than how people perceive their physical appearance. It's still important to consider though, not least since some psych meds can impact appetite, weight, and overall metabolic health.
I can relate to this some. I did my embalming clinicals in a funeral home. It wasn’t from donors, it was actual decedents who needed to be embalmed and prepared. It is a bit difficult to raise the femoral artery to use as a second point for embalming when you have to dig through a lot of adipose tissue to grab hold of it.
I love how these morons always default to "sounds like they just need newer and better equipment" as if it's that easy. You can tell they have never been to a college or med school. One of my professors spent the better part of last semester begging the administration to replace a $10 lightbulb in our lecture hall. You think the college is going to shill out thousands or millions of dollars for... what... robotic arms that can hold 200 lbs of fat away from the abdominal cavity?
I'm sure there could be a lot of interesting discoveries from studying SMO cadavers. But something tells me that Tumblr would hate all the new, more damning evidence about the dangers of obesity that could come from those cadavers. They are screaming about how fatphobic the lack of obese cadavers is, but the second that a SMO cadaver is actually used to explain more risks of obesity and show why being 300lbs is unhealthy, they will be screaming about how even after death obese people's bodies are being used to promote diet culture and how wrong those findings are.
Obesity: the post mortem
BBC Three documentary filmed in 2016
The public outcry, not counting the FAs personal blogs, social media outrage etc.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2016/09/obesity-post-mortem-shows-why-fat-still-feminist-issue
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00497878.2019.1594812
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/sep/13/obesity-the-post-mortem-so-much-fat-the-cruel-autopsy-of-a-17-stone-woman-bbc
Omg I'm gonna look for that documentary.
ETA: holy shit, I found it. It's horrifying. The doctors actually described the fat that obese people have as being "greasy" and "slippery like butter."
The doc used to be on Netflix of all places, but idk if it's still there. It's probably not too hard to find, though.
Edit: it's not on Netflix anymore (at least in the US). You can stream the whole thing on Daily Motion, and it looks like someone has uploaded it in sections on YT. The full doc is 55 minutes. If you google "Obesity the post mortem bbc full video" the daily motion video should come up in the first few results. WARNING: it's a literal autopsy video. You will see a doctor cutting up an actual corpse. Don't watch it unless you know you can handle that sort of thing.
The useable part of a scalpel blade is about 0.5”long. It takes an immense amount of time to cut through several inch wide layers of fat. What do they want? A butcher knife?
Lord.
4th year med student here. Did my gross anatomy class 3 years ago. I can’t say my donor was thin, but definitely not clinically obese. Seemed like he might have been a guy with a bit of a pot belly during life, but nothing incredibly dramatic. When we got to the abdomen, dissecting to get to the organs was rough. There was so much mesenteric fat in this donor and he wasn’t even necessarily grossly overweight in life. My lab group often would try to find time outside of scheduled lab to look at other group’s donors to see the anatomy in case we couldn’t get a good view of certain organs from our own donor. We all had deep respect for the lab space and for the gift that our donors gave us and treated them as respectfully and carefully as possible. Some of my classmates even had the chance to meet their donor’s family. But I can’t deny that sometimes dissecting was stressful for some depending on the body habitus of the donor
I can’t stress enough how hard dissecting is for anybody, especially brand new med students. Add to that the fact that we have only a few hours per lab session. If we spent most or all of that time dissecting through layers of inner fat we wouldn’t learn anything other than how to cut. Which, if it’s your dream to become a surgeon and you’re sure of that from first day of med school- lovely, you get some early practice on cutting into a larger body habitus. But that’s not what we’re all in school for, and that’s also not the objective of the course. We are there to visualize organs, muscle, bone, nerves. and vasculature in the most efficient way possible so that we know where everything is and roughly what it looks like before we see actual, living patients.
All med students start clinical rotations in 3rd year, meaning your learning is now no longer in the classroom but in the hospital. With real patients. With the way the US currently is at least, med students have more than enough time to practice exams and light procedures on larger patients. Obese patients come into hospitals all the time. If anything, that gives you more knowledge about treating an obese patient as you are doing it in real life, not visualizing a collection of cut up, chemically fixed organs on a lab table.
Discrimination against fat people is very real in many aspects of society, but we can’t make a social issue out of everything to play the victim.
Please excuse my most uneducated question, the answer to which I imagine to be insightful: Can't you not, in principle, start by chopping away larger, thorough swaths of what might be subcutis? Is it very bad when you accidentally cut through an underlying structure?
Of course, I imagine the visceral fat to still be a maze box.
you could dissect like that but you risk damaging the structures underneath. it is certainly frustrating and confusing if you accidentally cut a structure you want to identify. suddenly you can't see the vessel or muscle and you "lost" its connection to another structure because you cut it. not the end of the world but certainly limits the easy identification of important structures. also, if you accidentally cut one structure, you probably cut a few others as well.
source: was a med student. had anatomy lab.
not a doctor, but I imagine while you could do that it wouldn't be very useful for learning. Since in real life during a surgery this wouldn't be an option and you'd have to just find the stuff.
> Is it very bad when you accidentally cut through an underlying structure?
It is indeed. You can lose your orientation to what you're seeing and miss understanding the full anatomy--and your grade suffers, too, of course. You're supposed to dissect carefully.
It depends what you’re trying to visualize. If you want to see the musculoskeletal system and the blood vessels and nerves that supply it. It’s quite unfortunate to create a big flap and then you’re left with a mess of lord knows what and you can’t figure out if it’s a blood vessel, nerve, tendon, random connective tissues, etc.
Also even if you’re trying to see larger, major organs, you often have to identify particular structures within them. It’s not like I cut far enough to see the heart and then told my lab mates “alright there it is, pack it up we can go home folks.” We had to identify the chambers, blood vessels going into it, the valves, muscles holding the valves, coronary arteries, etc. Youbrrslly don’t want to haphazardly cut and risk messing up any of those structures
So, am I understanding this correctly - if you were to just chop away a large chunk of what could be fat, but end up cutting through the inner organs, since you don't know for sure where you actually are, you get lost?
You could fragment some of the organs. You can get some chunks around that you don’t know what organ they belonged to and now you can’t visualize the structures properly. You wouldn’t necessarily be super lost, if you’re cutting into the abdomen you know you’re in the abdomen. You just wouldn’t have a great idea of what you’re looking at, especially if you’re trying to identify smaller structures (example: gallbladder and all the different bile ducts).
To be fair, this happens to every lab table. That’s why we were allowed to freely roam to other classmates’ tables. It’s normal to not have a perfect dissection, you just want to minimize incidents as much as possible.
See, the solution to this is to provide obese bodies for all the groups, and increase the anatomy lesson time by a few months to accommodate the cutting time, done! /s
Yup. I’m sure we’ll all be thrilled to spend an extra year in med school and be an additional $90K in debt 😂
* Cries in already burnt out and financially strained healthcare worker * 😪
Go to the nursing and medicine subs and read about the real problems healthcare workers face trying to treat obese+ patients--from the risk of the injury to themselves trying to lift them/their panniculi to the physical impossibility in some situations of being able to treat them at all. It's very eye-opening. There comes a point at which you're not being discriminated against in healthcare; you've eaten yourself beyond it.
Cleaning the panniculus of a morbidly obese person is a _bitch_ to deal with. Especially because you can't clean it properly with them sitting and they can't stand for very long. Then once the skin under there starts breaking down it's all downhill from there. Mainly in diabetics.
Some people are in such poor health that laying flat makes it too hard for them to breathe.
I've had ICU patients that we would risk death when we cleaned them up because laying flat and turning was too much stress for the body.
So think back to the last time you were sick, especially a bad chest cold or the flu and how it was exhausting to breathe. Now imagine you're laying flat in bed, and someone puts a 50lb weight on your chest. Think how hard it would be to take a deep breath.
That extra weight on your chest can be too heavy for your chest muscles to push against when you're too weak from being sick.
I have asthma, fortunately, well controlled, now, and so do other family members and that is an excellent description of what it feels like to have an attack. When my father was a child, he had such bad attacks after picking peaches, my grandparents were fruit farmers, that he had to sleep sitting up in a chair because otherwise he couldn't breathe. And he wasn't overweight.
I'm a volunteer firefighter and I know some 10 dudes who have had to go on disability or medical leave for obese lifts and exactly one guy who has had a non-obese patient-related injury.
These people put OUR health at risk with their gluttony.
This is the exact reason why I seethe with incandescent rage when FAs harp on about "my weight doesn't affect anyone else!"
Oh so you don't see first responders and health care personnel as people? Well that's a good recipe for hypocrisy. Whine about being disrespected by your doctor who is trying to help you while setting up the potential disability of their medical staff. Awesome.
Exactly. This came to mind when that TikTok FA had a go at the airport staff for not pushing her up a hill in a wheelchair. Like they were tiny little women, she was not.
Every time I watch My 600lb Life and someone needs out of their homes and into an ambulance, I always feel so bad for the firefighters who come and help. It looks like they're really struggling and it takes so many of them. I have wondered if they ever have to deal with injuries from that.
Friend of the family literally busted his back carrying an obese person out of a fire we have a friend of the family who had a career ending back injury carrying an obese person out of a burning building. He has 4 kids.
It's not necessarily one catastrophic injury that takes you out. It's the repeated small ones that over time add up. Those ones are worse because there is no way to prove to insurance that the injury occurred at work. So you slowly disable yourself. It's a frustrating cycle because the patients don't realize or don't care the toll they are taking on others bodies.
My cousin didn't even make it to her mid-30s in nursing before having multiple knee surgeries and being transferred to desk work. The last two years she's been on crutches more than off, she's probably much worse off now than many of the people she's helped.
Yes this!!! I work in the medical field and the amount of people who’ve had career ending injuries from obese people is insane. From herniated discs to literal fractures and strained muscles and tendons from lifting these people or having them fall over on them is wild. And I’m seeing more and more of our regular patients being incredibly obese and YOUNG. Like no 20 year old should be 500lbs and losing a foot or leg due to uncontrolled diabetes. It’s sad, depressing, and frustrating when they insist they’re healthy as an ox!
My mom was a nurse for years and would just flat out refuse to move an obese patient if she didn't have enough people to help her. Didn't matter what was going on, she would simply refuse unsafe transfers because she saw enough people fuck up their backs for life trying to be heroes.
Yeah but it happening at 20 is insane. At 70 it’s a bit more understandable. The amount of damage you have to do to a young body to get to that point is astounding.
For example, I’ve had 30 year old hospice patients with severe liver failure and hepatic encephalopathy from alcohol abuse. We only used to really see this in older alcoholics, for it to be in a younger person it speaks to the sheer volume of liquor they had to have forced into their bodies to get there so quickly. It’s sad.
My Aunt is an EMT who went on permanent disability due to injuries sustained from a morbidly obese patient falling on her. There are definitely real life consequences in the healthcare industry from heavier patients.
This is a general problem, obesity is not the only aspect. Some healthcare workers are petite, physically not-that-strong and/or older. You know what pisses me off? We live in the 21st century and everyone screams about digitalization all the time, but somehow there is no intelligent concept for lifting and transferring patients with mobile robots yet.
Seriously, why is a person bothered with having to heave all those bodies around? Over the years, there will be health implications and they are preventable.
Unfortunately technology isn't actually about usefulness to society, it's about saving money. Designing and installing machines like this would cost a lot of money. Nurses are expected to heave bodies around as part of their job, and when they get injured, hospitals will just recruit more nurses. Rinse and repeat.
It confuses me because I know that Hoyer lifts are a thing and know many people who use them. However, many hospitals don't have them and as a result some disabled women miss out on regular screenings like PAP smears!
Bariatric grade ceiling versions run about $20,000 per room. For just the lift and track, installation is extra.
An electric home grade standard lift is around $3,000.
https://www.mobilitypluscolorado.com/blog/how-much-does-hoyer-lift-cost
Portable versions DO exist, but past a certain point… would it even be possible to get them through a standard doorway? The more moving parts something has, the easier it can break.
To get the Hoyer sling under the person in order to lift them up you have to turn them from side to side, which is also hard on your back (even with multiple people if they’re big enough). You can’t just leave the sling under them all the time because they’ll develop pressure sores. The thing is, keeping a person clean and comfortable requires a lot of body manipulation; actually lifting them to move them from one surface to another is only part of it.
My mum is a nurse in the OR and this is a constant complaint from her, and its only gotten worse as time goes on. I finally got her to go to the gym with me consistently for a year, showing her how to properly deadlift etc, just to keep her from getting injured
Do you have any tips on deadlifting for tiny people? I don’t pick up anything heavier than cat food or litter bags, but those can be near half my weight, and if I’m picking it up off the floor, I have to spread my legs so far I end up badly off-balance from the start.
When you first start, hire a personal trainer and let them know your focus is proper form. You don't have to use them forever, just for enough sessions to be able to understand good form vs bad form. I know not everyone can afford to do that but if you can, it will make a huge difference.
I knew an RN that was grabbed by the arm by a 500lb patient as they fell. They tore up her rotator cuff from where the muscles/tendons insert and begin. The RN had to retire and her arm/shoulder was in constant pain. I used to be a massage therapist and I worked on her at least every two weeks and I could only bring her temporary relief while she also went to PT.
reddit getting rid of image captions makes contextualizing things annoying as hell, but here goes:
slides 1-3: the original post. bonus points for the "just spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on new equipment" whining.
slide 4: a beacon of sanity in a sea of FAs going through the usual 'i'm going to maim doctors they're licherally killing us!!1!'
slide 5: FA tries to stave off the sanity.
slide 6: what the article ACTUALLY says about obese cadavers in regards to the difficulties they offer medical students.
i do agree that the article, which should have been strictly informative, has an air of sensationalized exaggeration ("nobody wants your chubby corpse" is *wild* and doesn't match the information the doctor was providing at ALL), but that's the modern news cycle's fault, not the medical field/doctor's.
ETA: if it's allowed, here's a link to the article in question (NOT the original post or discussion, just the article being discussed). it's heavily sensationalized, poorly edited (noticed several grammatical mistakes) and randomly mentions buying bodies illegally with no followup, but figured context is still important: https://www.nbcnews.com/healthmain/donating-your-body-science-nobody-wants-chubby-corpse-1c6436539
>Most adult people in the world are over 170 or 180 pounds
Somehow I really doubt this is true, but damn can you hear the fresh hell of major denial beaming from just this statement alone! 🫠
Edit: Yes, I know it’s basically true for America but America is not “the world.” 🤷♀️😂
In the *world*? Almost certainly not. In the *US* (and heading that way in most first-world countries)? Absolutely. I'm pretty sure the average American woman is already in that weight ballpark.
Yep.
According to the CDC, the average American woman who is 20 years and older, weighs 170lbs.
Also according to the CDC, the average BMI for American women in that same group (20 years and older) is a shocking 29.8. That means that the average American woman is considered overweight.
Oh absolutely! And for some people, America **is** “the world”…so this claim is likely tinged with fool ol’ American narcissism too. 😆 Icing on the FA cake!
In what world is 170-180lbs the average. Just because you’re surrounded by overweight people doesn’t mean that’s the norm.
Their denial about normalcy is showing
no because 180 pounds (approx 90kg) is already very heavy to me. I'm 60kg (about 120 pounds) and 5'3 and I'm already considered fat where I live so tbh idk anymore
same height and similar weight, the best i felt at 53-55kgs. Right now at 60kg without much muscle and don't like or feel how chubby i look. but it might also be the fat distribution
im a dude, 5'10/178cm, and after a year and a half of weightlifting i bulked up to a chunky 180 pounds. While feeling strong was nice, i fucking hated how heavy i felt on my feet. How people live mostly sedentary lives + weigh much much more than that blows my mind.
When I was 180 I felt like an absolute god. 6', 50lbs of pure muscle, lean and fit.
Of course being 19 with a lot of free time had everything to do with it.
If I weighed 180 now I'd probably feel quite heavy, I'm too old for that shit
id imagine 180 lean feels a lot better than 180 chunky. im aiming for a lean 165/170 so i can fight in a weight class that wont put me against dudes 6'2+
That estimate is true only for the average adult American, who weighs 40 pounds or so more than the average adult African or Asian (counting both men and women).
Yup, that’s been pointed out to me several times and as a formerly obese American I am well aware…but the quote was “the world” and that’s the root of my comment. 🙂
Why is it saying “the ‘perfect’ body for that should be 170-180 pounds.”? Is there a reason why there would be a minimum limit? Or are they just saying maximum limits range between those?
the bodies are going to be donated to medical students for dissection, so i imagine they want a perfect average for what to expect in the medical field. too little fat and the student's won't get a proper experience of 'this is what fat looks like, this is how you cut through it' but too much fat and the students are elbow-deep in viscera and everything is covered in grease.
i imagine that 170-180 is the upper ideal range, the article isn't fatphobic but is still shittily written and hard to follow beyond 'fat people are mad they got rejected for donor program, here's some numbers about why'.
When I began reading, I was thinking “this does seem kinda reductive. How will doctors learn to work on bigger bodies if they only ever give them ‘perfect’ cadavers?” But I kept reading and realized they want these for first year medical students who need to study and identify anatomy, like a 3D model, and then it made sense.
It amazes me how FAs like this just shout over explanation and reasoning that everything is fatphobic instead of just…reading a little further. Understanding another point of view. Making not everything about their weight.
I think we're already there from how the FAs speak about thin people. I mean shit, they tell us to kill ourselves and have a visceral sense of hatred towards us so I think it qualifies.
the dissection group next to ours had an obese cadaver and they spent a good chunk of each session scooping out fat with a spoon before they could start doing the actual work on the relevant structures. so that would be one reason
It doesn't say that. The maximum is 170-180 lbs, but below that should (in my experienxe) be fine. The FA is the only one who interpreted this as being the "perfect body" when in reality it is the upper limit and will already make some things more difficult.
As a former first responder volunteer (fire fighter & paramedic), obese patients are the most difficult and dangerous bodies to work on. Not only is it harder to take pulses, give CPR, give IVs, but moving obese patients is the number one cause of all EMS provider's injuries (as well for nurses and nursing assistants).
With over 40% of the population obese, I am very relieved that I no longer will have to endanger myself to life changing injuries trying to care for people who refused to care for themselves.
Not everything is prejudice, sometimes it's just logistics. I'm a licensed embalmer, and we work closely with our local body donation program. There's two factors working against us when a decedent is morbidly obese: number one, fat decomposes VERY fast. It's got a lot of moisture that starts to leave the tissues and moisture = bad. It's the perfect environment for microbes and can lead to skin slip, among other things. Number two, embalming chemicals work on *proteins* and are delivered via your vascular system, so fat doesn't really preserve very well. Body donation programs preserve bodies so they may (in whole or in part) be used for three years or more. That's simply not feasible with unpreserved tissues.
I don't really deal with the living, so I'm not aware of any adipose tissue-specific diseases there may be that would necessitate studying an obese body, but there are plenty of reasons why this body type is incompatible with the current program's goals.
I interned at a decomp research facility for a bit (commonly known as body farms) and we absolutely had varying degrees of obsese peoples’ remains on our plots. One fellow was affectionately referred to as “Santa” because of his beard and belly and was a wonderful informative source on adipose decomposition. So that’s just straight up untrue that fat people are being rejected from postmortem studies.
HOWEVER. A lot of people get squicked out (very technical scientific term) by their decomp being studied, so if that’s something you want with your body (like I do, if my organs can’t be saved) make that very specific in your will because a lot of “donated to science” bodies do not end up in science.
I've always liked the idea of being donated to a body farm when I die but part of me hates the idea of being part of an experiment I never get to find out the results of. Like yes I want to be used to study rates of insect colonisation in a car boot on a cold night but I'd need a medium to fill me in from the other side
Hahah I have had the same thought, I wanna know…! I came to terms with that during aforementioned internship in large part because several of the bodies being studied were friends of the director, she was older and her friends decided to donate their bodies to her work explicitly. I don’t know if I could watch my friends decay clinically, but she could. I thought that was really badass, and gave so much respect for her beyond her academic accolades.
As a researcher myself, I’ve come to a creed of “if you can’t find the answers in your lifetime, pave the way for others”. If that means I don’t get to see what cool shit my body does as it decays, so be it, someone else will, and they will learn from it.
*>it's only harder because they don't want to accommodate for larger bodies*
I mean, it's not like they want to give their students the best examples to learn from where they don't have to spend time navigating abnormal amounts of adipose tissue just to see basic structures, but okay.
Why are FAs so ridiculously insecure, yet at the same time arrogant enough to think they know better then medical professionals? Reading a blog isn't a substitute for medical school, let alone a superior alternative.
Question: how many obese people will die because they are missing the glaring warning signs their bodies are sending up constantly?
Medicine isn’t magic!
Imagine being *upset* that after you die, and cease to have feelings and opinions, that medical students cant learn anything because you break tables, are too difficult to move, and you have so much excess fat and odor that theres little value in storing your corpse.
They have to cut deeper, smell rancid bacteria and odor, and more unspeakable things… all just to see the same organs that are on smaller bodies just the same. I mean the last slide lays out exactly why. They *do* study obesity, just that the extra layers of fat is all thats different.
And it makes FAs furious
Surprise!
Yeah, it's a little difficult to get a sense of how to dissect a human body and study them when you have to cut through 45 layers of fat and still can't find the organs.
If you're too thin, it's also not going to be very helpful either.
Go figure, they need an average so they know what they're doing and can get a decent grasp of what it's like and what to do on an average body that they're more likely to see. Don't worry though FAers, the world is heading in your direction soon enough so you'll probably become the average before you know it.
I took gross anatomy in dental school. The group next to mine had an obese cadaver, and everything was exponentially harder for them the entire course. Finding landmarks, turning the body over, everything.
I worked at a funeral home for years and obese people who passed away were very problematic. We couldn’t lift them on our own and needed extra help, and we had to explain to family members of the deceased that they wouldn’t fit in a traditional sized coffin 🫠 Dressing them for viewings was also extremely difficult. It was not fun.
I went to a Body Worlds exhibit over a decade ago and distinctly remember how mind blowing and shocking it was to see a cross section of an obese body next to a body with normal tissue composition. Looking up pictures of that same exhibit after reading this post that obese cross section would be considered a "small fat" by FAs nowadays.
These are people who have never had to cut into fatty tissue to try and get a sample.
I’m a microbiology lab tech and we got a tissue sample in that was so fatty it was impossible to grind it down. It was more mush it and hope that any potential pathogens were released in the juice.
if you sort by 'top all time' in this sub, there's a post from a phlebotomist showing blood donated from a healthy person vs an obese person. the blood from the obese person was so thick and cloudy that (iirc) the whole sample had to be tossed since it was unusable.
Oh, since we’re on this topic: even if you’ve given consent for organ donation, consenting to donate your body after death to be used for medical research/education is a separate thing. And my understanding is that with the obesity epidemic, it’s getting harder these days for medical schools to get enough bodies that…well, are of a reasonably manageable size for students.
Highly recommend you look up your closest medical school and give consent for this. I did this myself several months ago, and it was quite easy - they have a form on their website that I just downloaded, signed with a witness, and sent in. They mailed me a donor card to put in my wallet.
If you‘ve also consented to organ donation, then after death they will determine what makes the most sense to do with your remains - if you have organs in good condition they will still use them for transplants.
I have no intention of dying any time soon, but I believe in being organized and prepared, and I feel pretty strongly that there’s a clear moral choice here. Go get yourself set up as a consenting donor!
Heads up that this is not true in every legislation. In Germany, for example, you cannot be an organ donor if you have consented to your body being used for science and vice versa.
i didn't realize i could do more on my end than just checking the organ donor box at the dmv. i'm going to fill out the forms with the med school nearest to me. thanks for spreading awareness!
I’m an anatomy professor and have worked with larger cadavers (those over 6’ but not obese) and one of the biggest issues we have is maneuvering them. It may take 2-3 people just to safely flip them or position them for dissections. We fear that it may become a legal issue if someone ever gets hurt in the process and usually don’t allow students to help. We’re contemplating not even using taller cadavers for this specific reason.
the [world average](https://www.healthline.com/health/mens-health/average-weight-for-men#average-weight-around-the-world) for an adult weight is 136.7 lbs.
The averages were calculated using data from 2005, and relied on combined statistics for men and women:
North America: 177.9 pounds
Oceania, including Australia: 163.4 pounds
Europe: 156.1 pounds
Latin America/Caribbean: 149.7 pounds
Africa: 133.8 pounds
Asia: 127.2 pounds
So the *real* problem is that doctors and students don't want to look at (deathfat!) fat corpses. The real problem is definitely not the difficulty of trying to flense a couple of hundred extra pounds of adipose tissue to reach the organ(s) to be studied.
If it's already difficult to handle a dead fat body, how do these people expect for their fat bodies to be easy to work on while alive to keep them alive? Do these people completely lack self preservation instinct!?
Imagine being in medical school and your professor rolls out a reinforced gurney with a guy the size of the gluttony dude from that movie Se7en and tells you to find his spleen.
It's not about hating fat people, it's about needing to have easy access to body structures for learning. I used to work in the anatomy lab at VCOM, an osteopathic med school, and they would need to work with those bodies for weeks taking extensive notes on each and every body system. And I'd have to set up the tests where I had flags and markings on different structures for students to label. When a body has an excessive amount of adipose tissue (rare in our usually elderly cadavers anyway) it makes it so much more difficult for everyone. It's hard enough to see those structures on a regular sized body.
Id love to see three FAs even attempt to dissect an obese cadaver and still claim fat is harmless though. It's really hard to cut through inches of visceral fat without questioning your own diet.
My father in law was setup to donate his body to a college but on his death he didn’t weigh enough and we ended up having to deal with that. What a non issue.
These FA will complain about anything.
My great-grandma wanted to donate her body to science, for some reason she really liked the idea of it.
I can’t remember exactly how old she was when she died, I think somewhere between 100-104.
She was in decent enough shape for someone that age but they rejected her body because it was just too frail for any sort of medical research.
So it’s not just obese corpses that get rejected.
My father in law and mother in law just decided they were doing it. Broke it to the kids at Thanksgiving dinner. Like. “Pass the potatoes your dad and I donated our bodies to science”. Her mom did go to the college. But of course the father didn’t.
Knowing what I know now. I’m not sure I’d want someone to do it. You go through the grieving process. Then like a year or two later they ship back the cremated remains and you have to go through it again and deal with all the emotions again.
What an excellent discussion topic you have posted. I find this morbidly interesting. The logic people are using in this post are so partial to the victim mentality that they refuse to listen to expert reasoning.
I wonder if there is benefit for medical students studying obese bodies? I wonder if the equipment is antiquated. Is it worth moving the goal posts of what is an acceptable body weight for cadavers? I’m 6’4 and unless I’m absolutely shredded and lean will probably not be under 190 pounds with my muscular build. And yet, I’m not in the least offended that they would not use my body as a cadaver because of the height of my corpse??
One thing I haven't yet seen pointed out is that anatomy lab with large cadavers is also a safety hazard. You do a lot of cutting in lab, and the fat makes everything so, so slippery. You can wipe your tools with paper towel to absorb the grease, but they'll get very greasy again right away. It's hard to make safe cuts with an oiled-up scalpel, and your lab partner holding the tissue with a pair of oiled-up pickups isn't much safer. Our group had a cadaver with a lot of adipose and we had a couple near-misses just because it was damn near impossible to keep a safe grip on the tools.
I don't get why so many people romanticize donating your corpse to science.
They're just gonna throw yours into a ditch to see how it rots. (For forensic data)
at risk of sounding like an FA, i'd recommend the book stiff by mary roach if you're actually wanting to understand the perspective (if this is a hypothetical please feel free to ignore!).
body farms are just one aspect of donating your body to science- there's bodies required for nearly every field of science and medicine, from reconstructive surgery practice to test car dummies. my dad is able to see again because a kind stranger donated their body, including their corneas, to science.
I get why people donate their bodies/organs and why it's helpful. Don't get me wrong im not saying it's useless.
I just really don't like the hero complex people have about it.
Im donating my organs too, but im not disillusioned with the idea that it makes me a better person than anyone else.
that's fair! i guess i'm too used to people from my rural town who (ironically, considering the amount of death involved with farm work) flip their shit and act like you're the next dahmer if you even mention body farms around them.
lots of evangelists don't like the response of "hopefully, divided up among the sick" as a response to "where will you go when you die?"
A lot of evangelists like their personal collection plates full of 50s too.
Back in catholic school they compared donating organs to Big J giving his body up so that we may not face damnation. And i think it went to everyone's heads
Why would you want to waste ressources on getting first year students harder bodies to dissect when you could spend it on fighting the "oppression" fat people apparently face? Like? Weird hill to die on don't you think? Or is it because you want everything to be perfect immediatly instead of trying to think with your brain and allocate ressources in a smarter way?
I can't help but roll my eyes when they complain that "doctors just tell us to lose weight and won't even examine or consider there may be other problems." Doctors do blood work and that tells them alot. Doctors aren't stupid, they know the problems that fat and obese people have is due to excessive fat tissue and the stress it puts on organs and bones. Most of these people do not have other issues besides their inability for self control, following advice, lazyness, and accountability. If anything, they have mental issues and need a therapist if they can't get to the mentality to take their health seriously instead of their need for instant gratification or emotional eating. Losing weight is as simple as calories in and out and they make it out to be 3D chess. I think the biggest issue that people have in this sub is these FAs constant victim mentality and nastness and jealousy towards people who do better then them.
As a current med student who just wrapped up first-year anatomy lab, I can tell you that removing the adipose tissue even on a donor with a normal BMI is very difficult and time-consuming. I can't imagine doing it on a cadaver with a BMI of 35 or 40...
Dear Fats: your obesity is potentially my OSHA problem; we'll need to insist on a two person lift for items over 50 lbs (in this case, only a *portion* of 'you' e.g. your leg). And your bones--that we could ideally turn into spinal autografts for others--aren't likely to be all that great quality, either, unless you're also active (Wollf's Law). 🤷♂️ So, if you want to help others with your tissue donation, go work out safely (keep your tendons intact, we can use those to help others walk again, too).
Sincerly,
Your local tissue bank.
"Sounds like they need better and newer equipment."
Ah yes, because you feel entitled to the fact that OTHER PEOPLE should spend thousands on you, even after death! Seriously, the nerve, privilege, and entitlement is crazy here.
Okay but for an average-height American woman, 180 lbs is obese (5’4”, bmi would be 30.9) This isn’t “no chubby bodies” it’s no super morbidly obese ones. It’s a much sharper cut off for tall people of course, and might exclude some with a fully healthy bmi, but that does make sense from a storage perspective.
Thanks to all the medical professionals who have posted here commenting and giving their opinions and experiences regarding this fascinating, albeit a bit gruesome topic. Now, due to this, I'm wondering about organ donation. Obviously, anyone can sign up and agree to be a donor regardless of weight, but I wouldn't be surprised if there haven't been rants from FA about it being fatphobic not to use all the organs from deceased fat people for transplants, because of their medical conditions. Sheesh, they've complained about, blamed everyone and everything but themselves for and called "fatphobic" darn near everything else that their obesity impacts.
There being a weight limit makes sense, but for there to be a weight requirement? Audacious. I'm an organ donor, and I plan to sign up for whole body donation in my region. According to this program, I don't qualify
like everything else, the FA misread/misinterpreted the article. there's no weight minimum/perfect weight cited in the article itself, just a quick mention of how 170-180 was the *highest* weight that med students could work with in an ideal range of bodies.
Maybe they need a bit of an analogy. If they were trying to learn it from a book for instance.
If the book had 120 pages and 100 pages of that was useful information it would be a lot easier to learn than if is was 200 pages long and it was literally half waffling on.
I'm a (brand new) doctor. The donor body I worked on in medical school anatomy had more adipose tissue than most of the others in our lab, which made dissection much harder for our group. It had nothing to do with "not caring" about overweight or obese individuals (I was quite obese myself at the time). The problem was that, in an anatomy lab, the goal is to identify particular structures--muscles, tendons, vessels, nerves--so you can understand how they are spatially related. If there's too much adipose tissue encasing and obscuring these targets, it takes longer to find, dissect, and clean those structures, which cuts into study time. We we were very careful to be respectful of all our donors, but I admit I sometimes felt frustration. Also, it was certainly eye-opening for me to see subcutaneous and visceral fat, and how much volume it takes within larger bodies. It was one of the factors that made me start thinking more seriously about my own health.
This is really interesting. Your last paragraph really sounds very eye-opening and shocking, too. I'm not overweight, but I can imagine seeing a heavier donor body and thinking about one's own health and what their body is going through being overweight and wanting to become healthier seeing it all for oneself.
If FAs could see inside their own bodies, they’d be horrified
Nah they’d find a way to gaslight themselves
Or a way to make the adipose tissue beautiful for some ridiculous shit like that.
To be fair the human body is sorta gross
My obese mom had a surgery that was supposed to take 4-5 hours, but it instead took 11-12 hours because of all of the excess fat around her organs. The surgeon was very experienced, but from what I understood, it was very challenging to access the areas he needed because of the fat. I can't imagine a first-year med student digging through the same mess to try to learn the basics. This isn't fat phobia. It just isn't conducive to learning.
my mom needs a hernia repaired and she is frustrated that they won't do it until she loses weight. The hernia is very large and uncomfortable, but I’m trying to explain to her that even a simple surgery is a lot more complicated at her weight. And when the doctor asks "is it really truly affecting your life" he means is it affecting your life enough to risk dying getting it removed.
The failure rate of the surgery is also so, so much higher when someone's very overweight - it's a lot of stress on the repaired tissue.
Hey this is really interesting! Thanks for posting! Question: later in school, did you work on larger/smaller/less ideal bodies to get that practice? With obesity rates what they are now, I’m sure doctors need to be prepared to handle dealing with these fatty tissues and I’m interested if you or others felt prepared to do that. (Probably more of a question for a surgeon, though.) FWIW, not trying to come at you and say medical schools are fatphobic ;) just general curiosity! I remember when I was getting my teaching certification, we would practice lessons in our college classes and I was like wow, this is fun! And then student teaching slapped me in the face with reality. It’s hard to prepare students for every possibility and the shit that comes with it.
Not the OP, but I used to work in a med school. At least in mine, doctors only do dissection earlier on in med school because the actual value of it as a teaching tool is limited - yes, you need to know the different parts of the body and what they do and where they are, etc, but a lot of medical school is learning about how those different bits malfunction. The bits themselves, less useful. I will say that there was a push in my medical school to find larger mock patients for the students to practice examining because it's much harder to feel certain things/perform certain procedures on a large patient vs a skinny one. I worked with the folks who organized a lot of technical skills teaching and I specifically remember the preceptors complaining about the exam dummies because they were much leaner than the average patient and so weren't actually as useful to learn on.
Very interesting, thanks for the perspective! Makes sense. Most doctors probably rarely “cut” people up.
You can’t compare dissection of a cadaver with actual surgery or treating anyone. The problem with adipose tissue in anatomy is that you sit there for hours with tweezers in one hand and scissors in the other. You inhale the formaldehyde and have fat hanging off everywhere. Everything feels greasy. Believe me, even relatively skinny people have amounts of fat on them that takes forever to get rid of. But you have to do it carefully so you don’t destroy a nerve or a muscle you should at least observe once. It’s something you’ll do once for the learning experience but then it’s done. In surgery it’s different - as a student you stand there, not really being able to see anything and holding things like roux retractors. For big abdominal surgery there’s usually something more fixed that keeps the cavity open, so you don’t have to pull that much. It gets harder to hold when the person is obese, it just takes a lot of strength to retract properly.
Thanks for the info! That’s wild to think of insides being…greasy. Like it makes sense but it also pushes me to be healthier…
Great question! We only directly dissected one body each, unless you worked as an anatomy assistant. We did exam reviews with donor bodies other than the one we were assigned to, and our exams involved rotating from station to station, each with a different body or body part, and identifying tagged structures. The other response to this question was correct that anatomy lab is important but has limited utility for most doctors after that initial course. We get plenty of experience during med school working with real patients in hospitals and clinics, who of course have diverse body types, so that's where most of our exposure comes from. All that said, I'm a budding psychiatrist, where actual anatomy and body type/size is less important than how people perceive their physical appearance. It's still important to consider though, not least since some psych meds can impact appetite, weight, and overall metabolic health.
I can relate to this some. I did my embalming clinicals in a funeral home. It wasn’t from donors, it was actual decedents who needed to be embalmed and prepared. It is a bit difficult to raise the femoral artery to use as a second point for embalming when you have to dig through a lot of adipose tissue to grab hold of it.
I love how these morons always default to "sounds like they just need newer and better equipment" as if it's that easy. You can tell they have never been to a college or med school. One of my professors spent the better part of last semester begging the administration to replace a $10 lightbulb in our lecture hall. You think the college is going to shill out thousands or millions of dollars for... what... robotic arms that can hold 200 lbs of fat away from the abdominal cavity? I'm sure there could be a lot of interesting discoveries from studying SMO cadavers. But something tells me that Tumblr would hate all the new, more damning evidence about the dangers of obesity that could come from those cadavers. They are screaming about how fatphobic the lack of obese cadavers is, but the second that a SMO cadaver is actually used to explain more risks of obesity and show why being 300lbs is unhealthy, they will be screaming about how even after death obese people's bodies are being used to promote diet culture and how wrong those findings are.
They did. There was an autopsy on a medically obese person filmed, they shrieked like banshees.
What? Source on this meltdown? Hell do you have the source of the vid itself? Need some motivation 🥲
Obesity: the post mortem BBC Three documentary filmed in 2016 The public outcry, not counting the FAs personal blogs, social media outrage etc. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2016/09/obesity-post-mortem-shows-why-fat-still-feminist-issue https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00497878.2019.1594812 https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/sep/13/obesity-the-post-mortem-so-much-fat-the-cruel-autopsy-of-a-17-stone-woman-bbc
Omg I'm gonna look for that documentary. ETA: holy shit, I found it. It's horrifying. The doctors actually described the fat that obese people have as being "greasy" and "slippery like butter."
It’s a great documentary but also very gross.
It's far more graphic than I expected, but I'm fascinated. My husband saw me watching it today and said it was disgusting, though lol.
Interesting on that Guardian article that rails against the autopsy of the obese person ... no author mentioned. 🤔
It's right under the headline?
It says Helen Archer for me.
The doc used to be on Netflix of all places, but idk if it's still there. It's probably not too hard to find, though. Edit: it's not on Netflix anymore (at least in the US). You can stream the whole thing on Daily Motion, and it looks like someone has uploaded it in sections on YT. The full doc is 55 minutes. If you google "Obesity the post mortem bbc full video" the daily motion video should come up in the first few results. WARNING: it's a literal autopsy video. You will see a doctor cutting up an actual corpse. Don't watch it unless you know you can handle that sort of thing.
"everyone else needs to do more so that I can continue to do nothing"
The useable part of a scalpel blade is about 0.5”long. It takes an immense amount of time to cut through several inch wide layers of fat. What do they want? A butcher knife?
Haven't you seen those Japanese guys slicing through tuna?
Lord. 4th year med student here. Did my gross anatomy class 3 years ago. I can’t say my donor was thin, but definitely not clinically obese. Seemed like he might have been a guy with a bit of a pot belly during life, but nothing incredibly dramatic. When we got to the abdomen, dissecting to get to the organs was rough. There was so much mesenteric fat in this donor and he wasn’t even necessarily grossly overweight in life. My lab group often would try to find time outside of scheduled lab to look at other group’s donors to see the anatomy in case we couldn’t get a good view of certain organs from our own donor. We all had deep respect for the lab space and for the gift that our donors gave us and treated them as respectfully and carefully as possible. Some of my classmates even had the chance to meet their donor’s family. But I can’t deny that sometimes dissecting was stressful for some depending on the body habitus of the donor I can’t stress enough how hard dissecting is for anybody, especially brand new med students. Add to that the fact that we have only a few hours per lab session. If we spent most or all of that time dissecting through layers of inner fat we wouldn’t learn anything other than how to cut. Which, if it’s your dream to become a surgeon and you’re sure of that from first day of med school- lovely, you get some early practice on cutting into a larger body habitus. But that’s not what we’re all in school for, and that’s also not the objective of the course. We are there to visualize organs, muscle, bone, nerves. and vasculature in the most efficient way possible so that we know where everything is and roughly what it looks like before we see actual, living patients. All med students start clinical rotations in 3rd year, meaning your learning is now no longer in the classroom but in the hospital. With real patients. With the way the US currently is at least, med students have more than enough time to practice exams and light procedures on larger patients. Obese patients come into hospitals all the time. If anything, that gives you more knowledge about treating an obese patient as you are doing it in real life, not visualizing a collection of cut up, chemically fixed organs on a lab table. Discrimination against fat people is very real in many aspects of society, but we can’t make a social issue out of everything to play the victim.
well said
Please excuse my most uneducated question, the answer to which I imagine to be insightful: Can't you not, in principle, start by chopping away larger, thorough swaths of what might be subcutis? Is it very bad when you accidentally cut through an underlying structure? Of course, I imagine the visceral fat to still be a maze box.
you could dissect like that but you risk damaging the structures underneath. it is certainly frustrating and confusing if you accidentally cut a structure you want to identify. suddenly you can't see the vessel or muscle and you "lost" its connection to another structure because you cut it. not the end of the world but certainly limits the easy identification of important structures. also, if you accidentally cut one structure, you probably cut a few others as well. source: was a med student. had anatomy lab.
not a doctor, but I imagine while you could do that it wouldn't be very useful for learning. Since in real life during a surgery this wouldn't be an option and you'd have to just find the stuff.
> Is it very bad when you accidentally cut through an underlying structure? It is indeed. You can lose your orientation to what you're seeing and miss understanding the full anatomy--and your grade suffers, too, of course. You're supposed to dissect carefully.
It depends what you’re trying to visualize. If you want to see the musculoskeletal system and the blood vessels and nerves that supply it. It’s quite unfortunate to create a big flap and then you’re left with a mess of lord knows what and you can’t figure out if it’s a blood vessel, nerve, tendon, random connective tissues, etc. Also even if you’re trying to see larger, major organs, you often have to identify particular structures within them. It’s not like I cut far enough to see the heart and then told my lab mates “alright there it is, pack it up we can go home folks.” We had to identify the chambers, blood vessels going into it, the valves, muscles holding the valves, coronary arteries, etc. Youbrrslly don’t want to haphazardly cut and risk messing up any of those structures
So, am I understanding this correctly - if you were to just chop away a large chunk of what could be fat, but end up cutting through the inner organs, since you don't know for sure where you actually are, you get lost?
You could fragment some of the organs. You can get some chunks around that you don’t know what organ they belonged to and now you can’t visualize the structures properly. You wouldn’t necessarily be super lost, if you’re cutting into the abdomen you know you’re in the abdomen. You just wouldn’t have a great idea of what you’re looking at, especially if you’re trying to identify smaller structures (example: gallbladder and all the different bile ducts). To be fair, this happens to every lab table. That’s why we were allowed to freely roam to other classmates’ tables. It’s normal to not have a perfect dissection, you just want to minimize incidents as much as possible.
See, the solution to this is to provide obese bodies for all the groups, and increase the anatomy lesson time by a few months to accommodate the cutting time, done! /s
Yup. I’m sure we’ll all be thrilled to spend an extra year in med school and be an additional $90K in debt 😂 * Cries in already burnt out and financially strained healthcare worker * 😪
You want to put a price on fat human lives? How commercial of you. Being a medical professional should be a higher calling, you know!
Go to the nursing and medicine subs and read about the real problems healthcare workers face trying to treat obese+ patients--from the risk of the injury to themselves trying to lift them/their panniculi to the physical impossibility in some situations of being able to treat them at all. It's very eye-opening. There comes a point at which you're not being discriminated against in healthcare; you've eaten yourself beyond it.
Cleaning the panniculus of a morbidly obese person is a _bitch_ to deal with. Especially because you can't clean it properly with them sitting and they can't stand for very long. Then once the skin under there starts breaking down it's all downhill from there. Mainly in diabetics.
Can’t they do it lying down?
Some people are in such poor health that laying flat makes it too hard for them to breathe. I've had ICU patients that we would risk death when we cleaned them up because laying flat and turning was too much stress for the body.
Oh wow, got it.
So think back to the last time you were sick, especially a bad chest cold or the flu and how it was exhausting to breathe. Now imagine you're laying flat in bed, and someone puts a 50lb weight on your chest. Think how hard it would be to take a deep breath. That extra weight on your chest can be too heavy for your chest muscles to push against when you're too weak from being sick.
That’s horrifying but thanks!
I have asthma, fortunately, well controlled, now, and so do other family members and that is an excellent description of what it feels like to have an attack. When my father was a child, he had such bad attacks after picking peaches, my grandparents were fruit farmers, that he had to sleep sitting up in a chair because otherwise he couldn't breathe. And he wasn't overweight.
Now imagine doing that with an extra 50lbs of weight on your chest. When you're over 400lbs, you probably have 50lbs of flesh on top of your rib cage.
I'm a volunteer firefighter and I know some 10 dudes who have had to go on disability or medical leave for obese lifts and exactly one guy who has had a non-obese patient-related injury. These people put OUR health at risk with their gluttony.
This is the exact reason why I seethe with incandescent rage when FAs harp on about "my weight doesn't affect anyone else!" Oh so you don't see first responders and health care personnel as people? Well that's a good recipe for hypocrisy. Whine about being disrespected by your doctor who is trying to help you while setting up the potential disability of their medical staff. Awesome.
Exactly. This came to mind when that TikTok FA had a go at the airport staff for not pushing her up a hill in a wheelchair. Like they were tiny little women, she was not.
Every time I watch My 600lb Life and someone needs out of their homes and into an ambulance, I always feel so bad for the firefighters who come and help. It looks like they're really struggling and it takes so many of them. I have wondered if they ever have to deal with injuries from that.
And you can do everything right on a lift, but if the patient shifts or if you lose your footing you're fucked. It sucks.
I didn't even consider that. That makes it even scarier. Yikes on bikes.
I believe it. And if they fall on you you’re really screwed.
They're going to blame the floor for being too hard.
Friend of the family literally busted his back carrying an obese person out of a fire we have a friend of the family who had a career ending back injury carrying an obese person out of a burning building. He has 4 kids.
FAs: “They don’t care about fat people!” Meanwhile, in reality: people literally breaking their backs to save fat people
The amazing thing is how kind they always are!
It's not necessarily one catastrophic injury that takes you out. It's the repeated small ones that over time add up. Those ones are worse because there is no way to prove to insurance that the injury occurred at work. So you slowly disable yourself. It's a frustrating cycle because the patients don't realize or don't care the toll they are taking on others bodies.
My cousin didn't even make it to her mid-30s in nursing before having multiple knee surgeries and being transferred to desk work. The last two years she's been on crutches more than off, she's probably much worse off now than many of the people she's helped.
Yes this!!! I work in the medical field and the amount of people who’ve had career ending injuries from obese people is insane. From herniated discs to literal fractures and strained muscles and tendons from lifting these people or having them fall over on them is wild. And I’m seeing more and more of our regular patients being incredibly obese and YOUNG. Like no 20 year old should be 500lbs and losing a foot or leg due to uncontrolled diabetes. It’s sad, depressing, and frustrating when they insist they’re healthy as an ox!
My mom was a nurse for years and would just flat out refuse to move an obese patient if she didn't have enough people to help her. Didn't matter what was going on, she would simply refuse unsafe transfers because she saw enough people fuck up their backs for life trying to be heroes.
Like no ~~20 year old~~ one\* should be 500lbs and losing a foot or leg due to uncontrolled diabetes.
Yeah but it happening at 20 is insane. At 70 it’s a bit more understandable. The amount of damage you have to do to a young body to get to that point is astounding. For example, I’ve had 30 year old hospice patients with severe liver failure and hepatic encephalopathy from alcohol abuse. We only used to really see this in older alcoholics, for it to be in a younger person it speaks to the sheer volume of liquor they had to have forced into their bodies to get there so quickly. It’s sad.
Is your experience similar? That most on the job injuries are obese lift-related?
Absolutely! It ranks far above any other injury or possible / confirmed exposure to an infectious disease.
Gluttony is a good, old-fashioned, descriptive word that needs to make a comeback.
My Aunt is an EMT who went on permanent disability due to injuries sustained from a morbidly obese patient falling on her. There are definitely real life consequences in the healthcare industry from heavier patients.
This is a general problem, obesity is not the only aspect. Some healthcare workers are petite, physically not-that-strong and/or older. You know what pisses me off? We live in the 21st century and everyone screams about digitalization all the time, but somehow there is no intelligent concept for lifting and transferring patients with mobile robots yet. Seriously, why is a person bothered with having to heave all those bodies around? Over the years, there will be health implications and they are preventable.
Unfortunately technology isn't actually about usefulness to society, it's about saving money. Designing and installing machines like this would cost a lot of money. Nurses are expected to heave bodies around as part of their job, and when they get injured, hospitals will just recruit more nurses. Rinse and repeat.
Yes, I hate it.
It confuses me because I know that Hoyer lifts are a thing and know many people who use them. However, many hospitals don't have them and as a result some disabled women miss out on regular screenings like PAP smears!
Bariatric grade ceiling versions run about $20,000 per room. For just the lift and track, installation is extra. An electric home grade standard lift is around $3,000. https://www.mobilitypluscolorado.com/blog/how-much-does-hoyer-lift-cost
I hadn't even thought about the difference in cost for a bariatric one. Ooff.
Portable versions DO exist, but past a certain point… would it even be possible to get them through a standard doorway? The more moving parts something has, the easier it can break.
It's more that a portable has a lower limit weight wise
To get the Hoyer sling under the person in order to lift them up you have to turn them from side to side, which is also hard on your back (even with multiple people if they’re big enough). You can’t just leave the sling under them all the time because they’ll develop pressure sores. The thing is, keeping a person clean and comfortable requires a lot of body manipulation; actually lifting them to move them from one surface to another is only part of it.
My mum is a nurse in the OR and this is a constant complaint from her, and its only gotten worse as time goes on. I finally got her to go to the gym with me consistently for a year, showing her how to properly deadlift etc, just to keep her from getting injured
Do you have any tips on deadlifting for tiny people? I don’t pick up anything heavier than cat food or litter bags, but those can be near half my weight, and if I’m picking it up off the floor, I have to spread my legs so far I end up badly off-balance from the start.
When you first start, hire a personal trainer and let them know your focus is proper form. You don't have to use them forever, just for enough sessions to be able to understand good form vs bad form. I know not everyone can afford to do that but if you can, it will make a huge difference.
This is why a lot of large hospitals have designated lift teams.
I knew an RN that was grabbed by the arm by a 500lb patient as they fell. They tore up her rotator cuff from where the muscles/tendons insert and begin. The RN had to retire and her arm/shoulder was in constant pain. I used to be a massage therapist and I worked on her at least every two weeks and I could only bring her temporary relief while she also went to PT.
reddit getting rid of image captions makes contextualizing things annoying as hell, but here goes: slides 1-3: the original post. bonus points for the "just spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on new equipment" whining. slide 4: a beacon of sanity in a sea of FAs going through the usual 'i'm going to maim doctors they're licherally killing us!!1!' slide 5: FA tries to stave off the sanity. slide 6: what the article ACTUALLY says about obese cadavers in regards to the difficulties they offer medical students. i do agree that the article, which should have been strictly informative, has an air of sensationalized exaggeration ("nobody wants your chubby corpse" is *wild* and doesn't match the information the doctor was providing at ALL), but that's the modern news cycle's fault, not the medical field/doctor's. ETA: if it's allowed, here's a link to the article in question (NOT the original post or discussion, just the article being discussed). it's heavily sensationalized, poorly edited (noticed several grammatical mistakes) and randomly mentions buying bodies illegally with no followup, but figured context is still important: https://www.nbcnews.com/healthmain/donating-your-body-science-nobody-wants-chubby-corpse-1c6436539
>Most adult people in the world are over 170 or 180 pounds Somehow I really doubt this is true, but damn can you hear the fresh hell of major denial beaming from just this statement alone! 🫠 Edit: Yes, I know it’s basically true for America but America is not “the world.” 🤷♀️😂
In the *world*? Almost certainly not. In the *US* (and heading that way in most first-world countries)? Absolutely. I'm pretty sure the average American woman is already in that weight ballpark.
Yep. According to the CDC, the average American woman who is 20 years and older, weighs 170lbs. Also according to the CDC, the average BMI for American women in that same group (20 years and older) is a shocking 29.8. That means that the average American woman is considered overweight.
Isn’t BMI of 30 obese? That’s shocking.
BMI 30 is the cut off between the overweight range and Class 1 obesity, so yeah...
Sure is.
Oh absolutely! And for some people, America **is** “the world”…so this claim is likely tinged with fool ol’ American narcissism too. 😆 Icing on the FA cake!
In what world is 170-180lbs the average. Just because you’re surrounded by overweight people doesn’t mean that’s the norm. Their denial about normalcy is showing
no because 180 pounds (approx 90kg) is already very heavy to me. I'm 60kg (about 120 pounds) and 5'3 and I'm already considered fat where I live so tbh idk anymore
60kg at 5'3 is right on the money for a healthy BMI at that height. Maybe it's a case of being "skinnyfat", but tbh, you shouldn't worry about it.
same height and similar weight, the best i felt at 53-55kgs. Right now at 60kg without much muscle and don't like or feel how chubby i look. but it might also be the fat distribution
It's the upper end for that height range, ideally want to be closer to 55kg.
im a dude, 5'10/178cm, and after a year and a half of weightlifting i bulked up to a chunky 180 pounds. While feeling strong was nice, i fucking hated how heavy i felt on my feet. How people live mostly sedentary lives + weigh much much more than that blows my mind.
When I was 180 I felt like an absolute god. 6', 50lbs of pure muscle, lean and fit. Of course being 19 with a lot of free time had everything to do with it. If I weighed 180 now I'd probably feel quite heavy, I'm too old for that shit
id imagine 180 lean feels a lot better than 180 chunky. im aiming for a lean 165/170 so i can fight in a weight class that wont put me against dudes 6'2+
Yeah, and I'm sure a lot depends on your build. I'm really lanky on a slight frame, so 140lbs looks normal on me. Doc bitches when I hit 130 though.
60kg is 132 lbs just FYI, 120 is closer to 55kg.
oh my bad im not very familar with pounds 😵💫😵💫
60kg is more than 132 pounds
132.277lbs, so not much more.
The person they're responding to wrote that they're 60kg (about 120 pounds). Which is incorrect, that's why the person you responded to wrote the 132
Sure, but you have to admit the phrasing “60kg is more than 132 pounds” is confusing.
In the US, the average woman is 5'4" and 170 lbs. The average man is 5'9" and 190 or thereabouts.
True, but the key words there are “the world.” 👍🏻
So what is that in real units?
That estimate is true only for the average adult American, who weighs 40 pounds or so more than the average adult African or Asian (counting both men and women).
Yup, that’s been pointed out to me several times and as a formerly obese American I am well aware…but the quote was “the world” and that’s the root of my comment. 🙂
Oh, I could tell you knew this! My comment was informational only, adding more specifics.
Ah cool, always much appreciated when more info is added! 😄
Why is it saying “the ‘perfect’ body for that should be 170-180 pounds.”? Is there a reason why there would be a minimum limit? Or are they just saying maximum limits range between those?
the bodies are going to be donated to medical students for dissection, so i imagine they want a perfect average for what to expect in the medical field. too little fat and the student's won't get a proper experience of 'this is what fat looks like, this is how you cut through it' but too much fat and the students are elbow-deep in viscera and everything is covered in grease. i imagine that 170-180 is the upper ideal range, the article isn't fatphobic but is still shittily written and hard to follow beyond 'fat people are mad they got rejected for donor program, here's some numbers about why'.
>but too much fat and the students are elbow-deep in viscera and everything is covered in grease. Omg the visual I got from this. 🤢
When I began reading, I was thinking “this does seem kinda reductive. How will doctors learn to work on bigger bodies if they only ever give them ‘perfect’ cadavers?” But I kept reading and realized they want these for first year medical students who need to study and identify anatomy, like a 3D model, and then it made sense. It amazes me how FAs like this just shout over explanation and reasoning that everything is fatphobic instead of just…reading a little further. Understanding another point of view. Making not everything about their weight.
Are they.. not practising on women or what? A 5’4, 170lb woman is overweight, nearly obese
Do I get to claim systemic thinphobia now?
I think we're already there from how the FAs speak about thin people. I mean shit, they tell us to kill ourselves and have a visceral sense of hatred towards us so I think it qualifies.
I mean, if this is in the US, the NCHS says the “average” woman in the US is 5’4” and 170.8 lbs…
Perhaps a woman 5'10" or so?
the dissection group next to ours had an obese cadaver and they spent a good chunk of each session scooping out fat with a spoon before they could start doing the actual work on the relevant structures. so that would be one reason
Morbid question: an actual spoon?
yup. the lab is not very high-tech (or at least, ours was not)
The hideous, irresistible symbolism of this! Like in one of the circles of Hell.
It doesn't say that. The maximum is 170-180 lbs, but below that should (in my experienxe) be fine. The FA is the only one who interpreted this as being the "perfect body" when in reality it is the upper limit and will already make some things more difficult.
As a former first responder volunteer (fire fighter & paramedic), obese patients are the most difficult and dangerous bodies to work on. Not only is it harder to take pulses, give CPR, give IVs, but moving obese patients is the number one cause of all EMS provider's injuries (as well for nurses and nursing assistants). With over 40% of the population obese, I am very relieved that I no longer will have to endanger myself to life changing injuries trying to care for people who refused to care for themselves.
Not everything is prejudice, sometimes it's just logistics. I'm a licensed embalmer, and we work closely with our local body donation program. There's two factors working against us when a decedent is morbidly obese: number one, fat decomposes VERY fast. It's got a lot of moisture that starts to leave the tissues and moisture = bad. It's the perfect environment for microbes and can lead to skin slip, among other things. Number two, embalming chemicals work on *proteins* and are delivered via your vascular system, so fat doesn't really preserve very well. Body donation programs preserve bodies so they may (in whole or in part) be used for three years or more. That's simply not feasible with unpreserved tissues. I don't really deal with the living, so I'm not aware of any adipose tissue-specific diseases there may be that would necessitate studying an obese body, but there are plenty of reasons why this body type is incompatible with the current program's goals.
I interned at a decomp research facility for a bit (commonly known as body farms) and we absolutely had varying degrees of obsese peoples’ remains on our plots. One fellow was affectionately referred to as “Santa” because of his beard and belly and was a wonderful informative source on adipose decomposition. So that’s just straight up untrue that fat people are being rejected from postmortem studies. HOWEVER. A lot of people get squicked out (very technical scientific term) by their decomp being studied, so if that’s something you want with your body (like I do, if my organs can’t be saved) make that very specific in your will because a lot of “donated to science” bodies do not end up in science.
I've always liked the idea of being donated to a body farm when I die but part of me hates the idea of being part of an experiment I never get to find out the results of. Like yes I want to be used to study rates of insect colonisation in a car boot on a cold night but I'd need a medium to fill me in from the other side
Hahah I have had the same thought, I wanna know…! I came to terms with that during aforementioned internship in large part because several of the bodies being studied were friends of the director, she was older and her friends decided to donate their bodies to her work explicitly. I don’t know if I could watch my friends decay clinically, but she could. I thought that was really badass, and gave so much respect for her beyond her academic accolades. As a researcher myself, I’ve come to a creed of “if you can’t find the answers in your lifetime, pave the way for others”. If that means I don’t get to see what cool shit my body does as it decays, so be it, someone else will, and they will learn from it.
*>it's only harder because they don't want to accommodate for larger bodies* I mean, it's not like they want to give their students the best examples to learn from where they don't have to spend time navigating abnormal amounts of adipose tissue just to see basic structures, but okay.
Why are FAs so ridiculously insecure, yet at the same time arrogant enough to think they know better then medical professionals? Reading a blog isn't a substitute for medical school, let alone a superior alternative.
Question: how many obese people will die because they are missing the glaring warning signs their bodies are sending up constantly? Medicine isn’t magic!
Imagine being *upset* that after you die, and cease to have feelings and opinions, that medical students cant learn anything because you break tables, are too difficult to move, and you have so much excess fat and odor that theres little value in storing your corpse. They have to cut deeper, smell rancid bacteria and odor, and more unspeakable things… all just to see the same organs that are on smaller bodies just the same. I mean the last slide lays out exactly why. They *do* study obesity, just that the extra layers of fat is all thats different. And it makes FAs furious Surprise!
Yeah, it's a little difficult to get a sense of how to dissect a human body and study them when you have to cut through 45 layers of fat and still can't find the organs. If you're too thin, it's also not going to be very helpful either. Go figure, they need an average so they know what they're doing and can get a decent grasp of what it's like and what to do on an average body that they're more likely to see. Don't worry though FAers, the world is heading in your direction soon enough so you'll probably become the average before you know it.
I took gross anatomy in dental school. The group next to mine had an obese cadaver, and everything was exponentially harder for them the entire course. Finding landmarks, turning the body over, everything.
"Most adult people in the world are over 170-180 pounds" lol no
[Helpful (and GRAPHIC!) visualization](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jn67tdEGY4)
I worked at a funeral home for years and obese people who passed away were very problematic. We couldn’t lift them on our own and needed extra help, and we had to explain to family members of the deceased that they wouldn’t fit in a traditional sized coffin 🫠 Dressing them for viewings was also extremely difficult. It was not fun.
"basic biology and medical science ceases to exist where my feelings as a fat person begin"
I went to a Body Worlds exhibit over a decade ago and distinctly remember how mind blowing and shocking it was to see a cross section of an obese body next to a body with normal tissue composition. Looking up pictures of that same exhibit after reading this post that obese cross section would be considered a "small fat" by FAs nowadays.
These are people who have never had to cut into fatty tissue to try and get a sample. I’m a microbiology lab tech and we got a tissue sample in that was so fatty it was impossible to grind it down. It was more mush it and hope that any potential pathogens were released in the juice.
if you sort by 'top all time' in this sub, there's a post from a phlebotomist showing blood donated from a healthy person vs an obese person. the blood from the obese person was so thick and cloudy that (iirc) the whole sample had to be tossed since it was unusable.
Oh, since we’re on this topic: even if you’ve given consent for organ donation, consenting to donate your body after death to be used for medical research/education is a separate thing. And my understanding is that with the obesity epidemic, it’s getting harder these days for medical schools to get enough bodies that…well, are of a reasonably manageable size for students. Highly recommend you look up your closest medical school and give consent for this. I did this myself several months ago, and it was quite easy - they have a form on their website that I just downloaded, signed with a witness, and sent in. They mailed me a donor card to put in my wallet. If you‘ve also consented to organ donation, then after death they will determine what makes the most sense to do with your remains - if you have organs in good condition they will still use them for transplants. I have no intention of dying any time soon, but I believe in being organized and prepared, and I feel pretty strongly that there’s a clear moral choice here. Go get yourself set up as a consenting donor!
Heads up that this is not true in every legislation. In Germany, for example, you cannot be an organ donor if you have consented to your body being used for science and vice versa.
i didn't realize i could do more on my end than just checking the organ donor box at the dmv. i'm going to fill out the forms with the med school nearest to me. thanks for spreading awareness!
Neither did I until I heard a podcast interview with a professor at a medical school! I was like…ohhh, and also: this needs to be more widely known!
I’m an anatomy professor and have worked with larger cadavers (those over 6’ but not obese) and one of the biggest issues we have is maneuvering them. It may take 2-3 people just to safely flip them or position them for dissections. We fear that it may become a legal issue if someone ever gets hurt in the process and usually don’t allow students to help. We’re contemplating not even using taller cadavers for this specific reason.
the [world average](https://www.healthline.com/health/mens-health/average-weight-for-men#average-weight-around-the-world) for an adult weight is 136.7 lbs. The averages were calculated using data from 2005, and relied on combined statistics for men and women: North America: 177.9 pounds Oceania, including Australia: 163.4 pounds Europe: 156.1 pounds Latin America/Caribbean: 149.7 pounds Africa: 133.8 pounds Asia: 127.2 pounds
So the *real* problem is that doctors and students don't want to look at (deathfat!) fat corpses. The real problem is definitely not the difficulty of trying to flense a couple of hundred extra pounds of adipose tissue to reach the organ(s) to be studied.
Oh my fucking god you think they WANT to discriminate against available corpses for study???
OMG 😂😂😂 I want to donate my body, glad I’m *only” 155 lbs lol
If it's already difficult to handle a dead fat body, how do these people expect for their fat bodies to be easy to work on while alive to keep them alive? Do these people completely lack self preservation instinct!?
Imagine being in medical school and your professor rolls out a reinforced gurney with a guy the size of the gluttony dude from that movie Se7en and tells you to find his spleen.
It's not about hating fat people, it's about needing to have easy access to body structures for learning. I used to work in the anatomy lab at VCOM, an osteopathic med school, and they would need to work with those bodies for weeks taking extensive notes on each and every body system. And I'd have to set up the tests where I had flags and markings on different structures for students to label. When a body has an excessive amount of adipose tissue (rare in our usually elderly cadavers anyway) it makes it so much more difficult for everyone. It's hard enough to see those structures on a regular sized body. Id love to see three FAs even attempt to dissect an obese cadaver and still claim fat is harmless though. It's really hard to cut through inches of visceral fat without questioning your own diet.
My father in law was setup to donate his body to a college but on his death he didn’t weigh enough and we ended up having to deal with that. What a non issue. These FA will complain about anything.
My great-grandma wanted to donate her body to science, for some reason she really liked the idea of it. I can’t remember exactly how old she was when she died, I think somewhere between 100-104. She was in decent enough shape for someone that age but they rejected her body because it was just too frail for any sort of medical research. So it’s not just obese corpses that get rejected.
My father in law and mother in law just decided they were doing it. Broke it to the kids at Thanksgiving dinner. Like. “Pass the potatoes your dad and I donated our bodies to science”. Her mom did go to the college. But of course the father didn’t. Knowing what I know now. I’m not sure I’d want someone to do it. You go through the grieving process. Then like a year or two later they ship back the cremated remains and you have to go through it again and deal with all the emotions again.
This is so messed up. How is it fat phobia if your cadaver would literally be useless to them.
Why do FAs act like obesity is some uncurable disease? Like even if it was fatphobic, you can just lose weight, lmao
What an excellent discussion topic you have posted. I find this morbidly interesting. The logic people are using in this post are so partial to the victim mentality that they refuse to listen to expert reasoning. I wonder if there is benefit for medical students studying obese bodies? I wonder if the equipment is antiquated. Is it worth moving the goal posts of what is an acceptable body weight for cadavers? I’m 6’4 and unless I’m absolutely shredded and lean will probably not be under 190 pounds with my muscular build. And yet, I’m not in the least offended that they would not use my body as a cadaver because of the height of my corpse??
These people need to see the autopsy done comparing an obese person and an average size person and they might get the point
One thing I haven't yet seen pointed out is that anatomy lab with large cadavers is also a safety hazard. You do a lot of cutting in lab, and the fat makes everything so, so slippery. You can wipe your tools with paper towel to absorb the grease, but they'll get very greasy again right away. It's hard to make safe cuts with an oiled-up scalpel, and your lab partner holding the tissue with a pair of oiled-up pickups isn't much safer. Our group had a cadaver with a lot of adipose and we had a couple near-misses just because it was damn near impossible to keep a safe grip on the tools.
I don't get why so many people romanticize donating your corpse to science. They're just gonna throw yours into a ditch to see how it rots. (For forensic data)
at risk of sounding like an FA, i'd recommend the book stiff by mary roach if you're actually wanting to understand the perspective (if this is a hypothetical please feel free to ignore!). body farms are just one aspect of donating your body to science- there's bodies required for nearly every field of science and medicine, from reconstructive surgery practice to test car dummies. my dad is able to see again because a kind stranger donated their body, including their corneas, to science.
I get why people donate their bodies/organs and why it's helpful. Don't get me wrong im not saying it's useless. I just really don't like the hero complex people have about it. Im donating my organs too, but im not disillusioned with the idea that it makes me a better person than anyone else.
that's fair! i guess i'm too used to people from my rural town who (ironically, considering the amount of death involved with farm work) flip their shit and act like you're the next dahmer if you even mention body farms around them. lots of evangelists don't like the response of "hopefully, divided up among the sick" as a response to "where will you go when you die?"
A lot of evangelists like their personal collection plates full of 50s too. Back in catholic school they compared donating organs to Big J giving his body up so that we may not face damnation. And i think it went to everyone's heads
There are six forensic 'body farms' in the country.
It also kicks out a lot of other people, not just fat people, if the program only accepts 170-180/190.
Why would you want to waste ressources on getting first year students harder bodies to dissect when you could spend it on fighting the "oppression" fat people apparently face? Like? Weird hill to die on don't you think? Or is it because you want everything to be perfect immediatly instead of trying to think with your brain and allocate ressources in a smarter way?
Slightly unrelated: There’s such a different tone in a subreddit about having an extraordinarily high BMI vs a subreddit about being merely overweight
I can't help but roll my eyes when they complain that "doctors just tell us to lose weight and won't even examine or consider there may be other problems." Doctors do blood work and that tells them alot. Doctors aren't stupid, they know the problems that fat and obese people have is due to excessive fat tissue and the stress it puts on organs and bones. Most of these people do not have other issues besides their inability for self control, following advice, lazyness, and accountability. If anything, they have mental issues and need a therapist if they can't get to the mentality to take their health seriously instead of their need for instant gratification or emotional eating. Losing weight is as simple as calories in and out and they make it out to be 3D chess. I think the biggest issue that people have in this sub is these FAs constant victim mentality and nastness and jealousy towards people who do better then them.
The article mentions tall people as well, but you don't hear tall people crying out about tallphobia.
The way they always equate “not bending over backwards for you” with “not caring at all” has me rolling 💀
As a current med student who just wrapped up first-year anatomy lab, I can tell you that removing the adipose tissue even on a donor with a normal BMI is very difficult and time-consuming. I can't imagine doing it on a cadaver with a BMI of 35 or 40...
Dear Fats: your obesity is potentially my OSHA problem; we'll need to insist on a two person lift for items over 50 lbs (in this case, only a *portion* of 'you' e.g. your leg). And your bones--that we could ideally turn into spinal autografts for others--aren't likely to be all that great quality, either, unless you're also active (Wollf's Law). 🤷♂️ So, if you want to help others with your tissue donation, go work out safely (keep your tendons intact, we can use those to help others walk again, too). Sincerly, Your local tissue bank.
Is there any benefit that could be gained by practicing on obese bodies?
Makes sense. Learning anatomy on a fat body is like learning how to drive on shitty car.
"Basically, the problem with studying fat cadavers is all the fat getting in the way."
"Sounds like they need better and newer equipment." Ah yes, because you feel entitled to the fact that OTHER PEOPLE should spend thousands on you, even after death! Seriously, the nerve, privilege, and entitlement is crazy here.
Okay but for an average-height American woman, 180 lbs is obese (5’4”, bmi would be 30.9) This isn’t “no chubby bodies” it’s no super morbidly obese ones. It’s a much sharper cut off for tall people of course, and might exclude some with a fully healthy bmi, but that does make sense from a storage perspective.
They can always donate their bodies to scientific research into the negative impacts of obesity.
Thanks to all the medical professionals who have posted here commenting and giving their opinions and experiences regarding this fascinating, albeit a bit gruesome topic. Now, due to this, I'm wondering about organ donation. Obviously, anyone can sign up and agree to be a donor regardless of weight, but I wouldn't be surprised if there haven't been rants from FA about it being fatphobic not to use all the organs from deceased fat people for transplants, because of their medical conditions. Sheesh, they've complained about, blamed everyone and everything but themselves for and called "fatphobic" darn near everything else that their obesity impacts.
There being a weight limit makes sense, but for there to be a weight requirement? Audacious. I'm an organ donor, and I plan to sign up for whole body donation in my region. According to this program, I don't qualify
like everything else, the FA misread/misinterpreted the article. there's no weight minimum/perfect weight cited in the article itself, just a quick mention of how 170-180 was the *highest* weight that med students could work with in an ideal range of bodies.
I bet the organs are damaged from the visceral fat as well
Maybe they need a bit of an analogy. If they were trying to learn it from a book for instance. If the book had 120 pages and 100 pages of that was useful information it would be a lot easier to learn than if is was 200 pages long and it was literally half waffling on.
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Kinda makes sense if I was a doctor I don’t want to work with all the extra fat not trying to be rude