If you are packing extra pounds, you may have more to ponder than your increased risk for diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease. Today’s doctors-in-training might have no idea of how to operate on you should you need surgery.
You also may want to squelch any do-good desire to donate your body to science. Cleveland Clinic’s Lerner College of Medicine turned down a 350-pound cadaver because it was too obese to be useful in anatomy classes.
“Someone that’s shorter and carrying a lot of weight, that is a problem,” Richard Drake, director of anatomy and surgery professor told MSNBC. “The storage is one issue, but when you are obese, there’s a lot of tissue everywhere. The students don’t get as good a learning opportunity.”
And it’s not just Cleveland Clinic. Many medical schools around the country will not take too-fat bodies, despite the fact that more than a third of U.S. adults are obese and that number is growing every day. Why not have medical students practice on cadavers sized similarly to those they are likely to see in the operating room?
Experts told MSNBC that bodies taller than 6-foot-4 or heavier than 300 pounds generally won’t fit on the trays meant to store them. Also, the embalming process can add 100 to 150 pounds to the person’s natural weight.
So when exactly, will new doctors learn how to deal with a third of the population?
That can come later, said Ronn Wade, director of anatomical services at one of he largest body donation programs in the country at the University of Maryland Medical School.
Unfortunately, “later” seems to mean when a fat person is in the operating room needing surgery.
This article appears in Jan 4-10, 2012.
I love giant leaps of logic. They are what make the news so entertaining. I am a medical student. Anatomy class is not about learning how to do surgery, it’s about learning normal anatomy. That’s why it’s called anatomy class and not surgery class. We don’t only not know how to perform surgery on obese people, we don’t know how to do surgery on anyone, because we are medical students. Surgical techniques are learned as a part of surgical residency, and intensive 6 year program after medical school in which residents spend 80+ hours in the hospital each week learning surgery under the guidance of highly trained physicians. To do that they need to know basic anatomy. Which is what they learn in anatomy class. Extra fat tissue does not change basic anatomy, and it does in fact get in the way of learning anatomy effectively. There is a cataclysmic difference between performing a surgical procedure and dissecting to learn anatomy, just like there is a difference between learning to shoot a soccer ball on an empty goal, and shooting on a goal with a goalie and defenders during a game. But you have to do one before you can do the other. Please make a rudimentary effort to understand what you are talking about before writing an article in the future.
Do you have data showing that surgeons from med schools that include obese bodies are more skilled at operating on obese patients than surgeons from med schools without obese bodies? If not, you have no right to say that those doctors are less skilled, let alone that they “might have no idea of how to operate on you should you need surgery.”
First sentence: “If you are packing extra pounds, you may have more to ponder than your increased risk for diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease.”
If your job is to write, and you can’t consistently piece an English sentence together in a (presumably) copy-edited magazine, why would I ever believe your spouting off about something you know nothing about?
@BLB I stand corrected. It should read “increased risk of diabetes…” Thanks for pointing it out. This is the blog, not the magazine, but we do our best to copy edit the blog before posts go online. Sometimes things slip through.
@ndb177 and Hilary-Didn’t mean to offend anyone. This was meant to be sarcastic. I’m well aware of the difference between first year anatomy and a surgical residency. And my point is basically true–the first time any new surgeon encounters the additional problems associated with obese patients is going to be when they are actually in a real OR.
And no, I have no data however, it’s well known that surgeons in various specialties often have great difficulty with procedures in the morbidly obese and in some cases, cannot do them at all. I imagine a Pubmed search would turn up some outcomes data in obese vs. nonobese patients, if only for a specific procedure.
I have done lots of rudimentary research into a lot of medical things. I’ve been a clinical medical writer for 25 years with a number of specialty areas. Again, this is a blog and the post was meant to put a sarcastic spin on an MSNBC news article. We do a lot of that here on the Scene blog.
I read that original article and all it was saying was that obese people who want to donate their bodies to science may find difficulty in the fact that their bodies may not be accepted at institutions. It didn’t really insinuate that the institutions were wrong in doing that, nor did it mention medical students in a surgical context so I guess I don’t really understand the point you’re trying to make in regards to that article. Additionally, the writing does not come across as sarcastic
I hate to come across as rude, but I’d like to reply to your comment because of the importance of this issue to the medical students whose future skills are being questioned.
Yes, surgeries on obese patients are more difficult. That does not mean that dissecting obese patients in first year anatomy will make them any less difficult. Like ndb177 mentioned in his first comment, anatomical dissection is completely unrelated to surgical skills.
Does your readership know that your articles make claims unsupported by data? The majority of Americans are generally uninformed about the medical education system and would likely believe your claims, which could have undeserved damaging effects on the community’s attitudes toward medical schools, in Cleveland and everywhere.
If you enjoy writing satire, write for the onion…?
Maybe the primary purpose is to get people to interact and exchange data and understandings. I like when clevescene says off color and sarcastic things and then gets people to reprimand them for their insensitivity. If you want to have reporters run main stream and liability-proof crap, read the PD or the Dispatch. Clevescene has a little fun and is not so tight assed. If anyone would in anyway look at a blog and form their medical opinions on it, they indeed need to chill out.
I was going to make some comments on this, then I read most of ndb’s comment. I think they covered all the bases here, excellent comment.