For conditions like obesity and depression, treatment can change lives — even if doctors are not sure how.
 | By Alexandra Sifferlin Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
Why would a doctor hesitate to use medication for his own health? |
One such physician, Aaron Carroll, revealed in a Times Opinion guest essay that he was once reluctant to publicly share that he's taking a drug to treat his obesity. "Before writing this essay, I had told just a few people I'm on the drug. I think it's because, on some level, I still feel shame," he writes. "I felt the same when I finally started taking an antidepressant." |
Carroll argues there are certain health conditions that, because of limited scientific understanding of their causes, have become deeply stigmatized. He shares how, even as a doctor, bias led him to believe that his struggles with obesity and depression were personal failings and seeking treatment would be a form of cheating. |
Both starting an antidepressant and taking a new drug for obesity improved his health. Carroll isn't arguing that everyone needs medication. Rather, he points out the perverse ways that medical uncertainty can create opportunity for inaccurate narratives about people's health to take hold. |
"Mental health disorders and obesity fall into a bucket of diagnoses that, amid a lack of complete knowledge of their causes, are subject to societal moralizing and stigma," he writes. "We make assumptions that people with depression aren't trying hard enough, that people with obesity lack willpower. These stigmas are then compounded by a limited understanding of how their treatments work, leading to further judgments of people who seek them." |
Sometimes in medicine there are not clean-cut answers. We don't know why S.S.R.I.s work for some people and not for others. We don't know why some people who want to lose weight struggle, and others do not. We don't know how exactly popular new drugs for obesity work; we just know that they do for many. "What we should focus on is their potential to improve lives significantly, much as they have for me," Carroll writes. "Medical treatments should not be dismissed just because we don't fully grasp their mechanisms; people who use them are not cheating." |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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