"You smell the disgust": when fatphobia takes hold in health care

From simply getting an appointment to being treated in the emergency room , discrimination is rife for racialized people, the precarious, migrants... This is the damning observation made in a report by the Defender of Rights published this Tuesday morning.

1,500 testimonies from patients and healthcare workers were collected, all of which report discriminatory language and behavior in the care pathway. Claire Hédon calls for "mobilization of public authorities and healthcare stakeholders."

Among these patients who are victims of discrimination are those who are overweight or obese. They are often victims of fatphobia and sometimes misdiagnosis. A situation Julie experienced. She felt as if she were suffocating without any physical effort, and she suffered stabbing chest pains. "I know my body," Julie says. "I felt like I was going to die," she adds.

Faced with these abnormal symptoms, her doctor, helpless, sent her to the nearest hospital where she was treated by an emergency room doctor. “After all the checkups they did, the doctor came back to see me and said, 'Anyway, you're obese, it's normal to be short of breath,'” she sighs.

And there, the standoff begins. She wants to get treatment, but he wants to send her home.

"What saved my life was that my doctor wrote me a letter saying 'I suspect an embolism'. And the emergency room doctor himself admitted to me that he had to prove that it wasn't that. In fact, to cut a long story short, half my lungs were no longer functioning. It was extremely serious," says Julie.

Symptoms that are ridiculed or even denied altogether. “Oh, we'll have to go on a diet, we'll have to lose weight”... Phrases Marine has heard too often in the hospital for a triple fracture or a herniated disc. Phrases also delivered by a gynecologist. An appointment she still struggles to put into words.

“The innuendo, the look he gives you, you feel the disgust. It was a very bad experience, so it was over,” she sighs. Since then, “traumatized,” she says, the sixty-year-old has avoided doctors’ offices at all costs.