Some of my followers might know that I’m a voluntaryist – that’s someone who believes that you own your body and should have the ability to freely contract with whomever you please (for whatever you please). This philosophy has a lot of implications, and in my particular case, the rejection of third-party governance in totality. Though I talk a lot about privilege politics on this blog, in RL I talk a lot about ethics, politics, and economics, and specifically a set of ethics centered on the non-aggression principle.

However, there are times when the two spheres of my activism intersect. That’s this case in this article. Here’s the salient quote:

Obesity Australia’s John Funder said GPs should be able to engage patients about weight, regardless of whether they’ve visited the doctor “because they’ve got a cold or a broken toe”. Speaking ahead of an obesity summit in Canberra on Thursday, Mr Funder said the group would work with the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners to develop the guidelines and an information kit for GPs. The anti-obesity proposal has been influenced by a similar partnership involving the American Heart Association, the American College of Cardiology and the US Obesity Society. Central to the GP plan is having obesity classified as a disease, because “if it’s not a disease, it’s an intrusion”, Professor Funder said.

(bold mine)

Already you should smell something fishy. The science of health is a science. It doesn’t respond well to political arguments. You can’t just wish a scientific conclusion is or isn’t true, without further evidence to back up your claim, and have it be so. You can’t just deem something is a disease, or an epidemic, and suddenly it’s true. Though engaging in doublespeak is standard in political discourse (sadly), in science words need to have actual definitions or else you threaten to render your argument utterly meaningless.

To put it another way, you can’t just say that 2 + 2 = 5 because it serves some other end, even an arguably noble end, to have people believe that. Say that, for whatever reason, you could avert a war if you convince a certain set of people that 2 + 2 = 5. Would 2 + 2 = 5? Of course not. If you say that calling obesity a disease could reduce the incidence of obesity through forced evaluation (though there is little evidence of that), it still doesn’t make obesity a disease.

The logic chain is:

we don’t like fat people, and have decided through some convolutions of statistics (in the context of nationalized healthcare) that they cost us lots of unnecessary money -> doctors don’t always bring up weight at every appointment and if they did it might reduce the number of fat people -> diseases require intervention by a doctor or else doctors might get sued/lose their licenses -> calling obesity a disease will force doctors to bring up weight at every appointment

See any science in the argument above? No. It’s merely a way for some doctors or public health special-interest groups to force intrusive political desires onto other doctors who, perhaps because they have experience and knowledge that contradicts seeing fat patients as fat first and patients second, don’t always bring up weight loss if a patient “has a cold or a broken toe.”

Giving special interest groups too much power over the internal behavior of their colleagues is a bad idea. It’s both unethical and impractical, especially in times of moral panics where the not-so-expert public is clamoring to solve certain ‘problems’ that might not be actual scientific or social problems (or whose 'solution’ is far worse than the 'problem’).

-ArteToLife