Overweight people are more likely to argue with doctors: Study

According to a recent study, overweight persons are more prone to argue with their doctors about weight management and lifestyle suggestions.

Oxford University Press has released a new study in Family Practice. Obesity has quadrupled between 1975 and 2016, according to the World Health Organization. General practitioners play an important role in weight reduction and obesity medical care. The quality of information, mutual comprehension, and agreement between physicians and patients all have an impact on a patient’s health, compliance, contentment, and trust in his or her doctor.

Previous study has revealed that patients and doctors frequently have opposing views about weight. Patients ascribe excess weight to uncontrollable variables (e.g., heredity, hormones), whereas clinicians attribute it to behavioural, and hence controlled, factors (e.g. nutrition, physical activity). While numerous variables influence patients’ weight and health, inequalities in weight perception may affect doctor-patient contact.

The purpose of this study was to see if the interaction between patients and doctors, as evaluated by their disagreement on information and recommendations offered during the consultation, altered according to the patient’s BMI.

In September and October of 2007, 27 general practitioners and 585 patients from three regions of France participated in the project’s quantitative phase, answering questionnaires that collected both general practitioners’ and patients’ perceptions of information and advice given at the end of the consultation.

The disparities in the patient’s and doctor’s assertions about actions, information, and counsel during the same visit, the patient’s health status, and the perceived quality of their connection were investigated. For example, the questions about weight loss were: “Did your doctor advise you to lose weight during the consultation?” (Answered by patients) and its counterpart “Did you recommend weight loss to this patient during the consultation?” (Doctors respond.)

Disagreement was defined by differences in replies supplied by doctors and their patients.

For the majority of the questions, including those concerning activities, information, advice, and the patient’s health state mentioned during the doctor’s session, agreement between patients and doctors was weak (20-40% agreement) or moderate (40-60% agreement). For questions about the perceived quality of the patient-doctor relationship, agreement was quite low (less than 20%).

Researchers also discovered that the more overweight the patient was, the more doctor-patient disagreement there was. Disagreement was most obvious when it came to doctor-given weight-management and lifestyle advice.

Overweight individuals were more likely to disagree with their doctors about weight reduction counselling, physical activity advice, and dietary advice when compared to patients with a “normal” BMI.

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“An assessment of the patient’s representations and weight concerns might be given by general practitioners as a platform for dialogue and appropriate assistance,” said Laetitia Gimenez, the study’s main author.

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