Radical change in community attitudes towards obesity is needed if there are to be any major gains in addressing what has become a national crisis, says a leading Victorian bariatric surgeon.
And Associate Professor Wendy Brown says health professionals also need to lift their game.
“There is a lot of stigmatisation attached to obesity and that’s not just perpetuated by society, there is also a lot of stigmatism within the health profession for people who can’t lose weight,” she said.
“We tend to blame the patient, it’s almost like taking the moral high ground.”
Professor Brown said there was often an over-simplistic approach to weight loss and management that it is all about making sure the energy in (i.e. food) is less than the energy out.
“There is a lack of understanding that equation isn’t always as simple as that,” she told the limbic.
“One of the keys is educating health professionals that obesity is a disease – people do suffer with their obesity, physically, socially and psychologically.”
Professor Brown is a senior Upper GI surgeon and an Associate Professor of Surgery at Monash University, as well as director of the Monash University Centre for Obesity Research and Education (CORE), and president elect of the Obesity Surgeons Society of Australia and New Zealand (OSSANZ).
She said there did appear to be some change in attitudes towards obesity, with many more patients opting to undergo bariatric surgery in a bid to both lose the weight and keep it off.
“I think people are surprised to hear that only 3% of people can keep the weight off (through diet and exercise alone),” she said.
A need for less red tape
She recently co-authored a Perspective in the Medical Journal of Australia, which revealed the magnitude of bariatric surgery in Australia and raised concerns about the existing ethics review process.
In 2016 the authors estimated that there would be more than 15,000 bariatric surgery procedures across the country, at a direct cost of more than $225 million.
“Yet there are no evidence-based guidelines directing who should be offered this surgery, nor are there any long-term community data documenting its safety and efficacy in Australia,” the authors wrote.