#150: Medical Care Without Weight Stigma with Size-Inclusive Physician, Dr. Mara Gordon

The Full Plate Podcast with Abbie Attwood, MS

The first 45 minutes of this conversation are FREE! Listen to the extended version of this episode when you subscribe to Patreon here.

Dr. Mara Gordon joins the pod to share what it means to be a size-inclusive physician and why it’s time to rethink weight in medicine.

We discuss why it’s harmful to center medical care on a patient’s weight, the stigma and negative health consequences of medical providers prescribing intentional weight loss, how to advocate for yourself with your physician, declining to be weighed at the doctor's, why BMI is so problematic, caring for and treating diagnoses without weight loss, and her thoughts on the GLP-1 hype.

Mara also opens up about what she regrets as a physician prior to finding fat-positive medicine, and how she came to see the harms of anti-fat bias and diet culture more broadly.

In the EXTENDED version (a bonus episode that you can find at www.patreon.com/fullplate), Mara answers questions about:

• her concerns about GLP-1s like Ozempic, and what we can do to think about them differently
• how larger bodied humans can advocate for themselves at the doctor’s office without giving the unwritten message that they're “noncompliant” or don't care about their health
• how to deal with being told weight loss will help a specific health condition (like diabetes, joint pain, sleep apnea)
• why folks in larger bodies need to receive the same treatments offered to thin-bodied folks
• how “obesity” as a pathological condition has its roots in the pharmaceutical industry, and it started in the 90s

More about Dr. Mara Gordon:

Dr. Gordon is a family physician and writer based in Philadelphia. She worked in public health in Tanzania and Malawi before returning to the Philadelphia area to attend medical school at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was awarded the Zervanos Family Medicine Award for a medical student going into family medicine. She cares for patients of all ages at the Cooper Family Medicine office at the Kroc Center in Camden. She loves working with medical students in preclinical and clinical educational settings. She teaches selectives in Narrative Medicine and Audio Storytelling and co-directs the Narrative Medicine Scholarly Concentration. She continues to write professionally about issues in contemporary medicine. Learn more about her here.

Check out Medical Students for Size Inclusivity here.

You can read more of Mara’s work here: maragordonmd.com

Here's more about AWSIM: www.weightinclusivemedicine.org

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