The reason fat cadavers are not accepted for medical programmes is that you need to cut through every layer of fat carefully. Which takes time, and lab sessions are inherentely limited in that. It's better for med students to spend that time looking at what organs actually look like in bodies. This isn't fatphobia, it's just .. the way dissecting bodies works? In the same way surgeries on fat people take longer because there's just physically more tissue. The alternative would be to force the med students who get fatter cadavers to do more lab sessions at weird times outside of the usual schedules. Or force them to stay over the holidays. Or not let them get enough time to do the lab work they need to. Which imo would be a bit fucked up especially when med school is already so difficult and time-consuming.
It’s fatphobia. Fat bodies absolutely need to be studied. To ignore an entire demographic of oppressed individuals in the medical field for the sake of convenience(?!) is violence. Did you even read the article? They called working on fat cadavers “unpleasant.” It’s fatphobia and it’s unacceptable.
lmaaooooooooo
So
The internal organs aren't the end-all be-all of medicine, even for surgeons. It is still incredibly important for med students to learn about the skin and adipose layers. The point of doing these dissection exercises isn't just to give med students a chance to poke around human guts. It is to familiarize themselves with every part of the body. I only got one semester into a nursing career that didn't work out, but in that one semester I took an Anatomy & Physiology course and we did do an animal dissection and the very first thing we spent time on was the skin layer.
Not only is the practice of dissection meant to familiarize med students with every part of the body, it's meant to give them a chance to see real human bodies. Because what you see in anatomical diagrams in text books isn't normal. Bodies aren't mass manufactured, they do not all look the same, and the practice of examining cadavers gives med students real world experience seeing different ways bodies can vary.
Purposefully rejecting a certain body type is actively detrimental to their education. When institutions refuse to teach their students how to work on certain bodies, the industry then treats those people as "difficult to work with" because they don't know how to. You see it all the time in more low-stakes industries as well — fashion institutes not teaching how to dress fat bodies, leading to designers who think creating plus size clothes is too hard; beauty schools not teaching how to work with Black hair, leading to hairdressers who think Black hair is uniquely difficult to work with rather than just a texture that requires a slightly different technique.
How much extra time are we talking here? Because Anon you make it sound like it can take HOURS, if not DAYS. And yet I, a certified Superfat, had surgery on the fattest part of my belly a couple of years ago, and the whole procedure took 90 minutes. And that, of course, included the time it took to put me to sleep and controlling the bleeding, all things that a med student working on a cadaver doesn't have to worry about.
The alternative to med students using fat cadavers is doctors working on living patients who do not have the skills to care properly for their fat patients. Which leads to them either refusing to treat those patients, or to them getting hands-on experience on living patients, instead of on a cadaver, which is the whole point of med students working on cadavers.
So, Anon, what you're arguing here, is that it's far more important and humane to save med students an extra (let's be generous) hour in lab time, than it is for fat patients to have a doctor who's willing to help them and has experience working on bodies like theirs, and therefore is less likely to cause them harm in the process.
Over and over, the argument being made, which I'm expected to agree is purely objective, logical, and unbiased is:
It doesn't matter if fat people die.
These are all arguments I've actually heard, and all by people claiming that they don't hate fat people, that they aren't fatphobic, that their argument is just common sense, and everybody knows it:
"If EpiPens aren't made with needles long enough to work on fat bodies, fat people with allergies should just lose weight." - It doesn't matter if fat people die.
"Fat people are a financial burden on the healthcare system. The NHS is wasting money on making ambulances that can accommodate fat people." - It doesn't matter if fat people die.
"The reason firefighters shouldn't have to save fat people from burning buildings is because they aren't easy to carry out, and firefighters can get injured in the process." - It doesn't matter if fat people die.
"Covid is actually a good thing because it's mostly only killing fat people." - It doesn't matter if fat people die.
"The reason so many doctors have patient BMI limits on who they will perform surgery on, treat, or even agree to have an appointment with, is because it's too hard to treat fat people." - It doesn't matter if fat people die.
And now: "The reason fat bodies aren't studied is because dissecting their cadavers is inconvenient."
It doesn't matter if fat people die.
There is nothing that's not more important than fat people's lives. Convenience, money, time, comfort, ease - nothing. Because fat people aren't important at all. We are expendable. We're actually not even something that gets cut because we were never being accounted for to begin with. We are worthless.
It doesn't matter if we die. Actually, if we all died it would be convenient. A bonus.
This isn't fatphobia, "it's just...the way it works?"
#It's so wild how often fatphobia is this extreme and yet always coming from someone who consideres themselves completely impartial#The most common fatphobic argument being expressed is literally that it doesn't matter if fat people die.#It is that extreme and yet so commonplace that it's entirely casual and most people don't even blink. Don't think anything of it all.#And I'm just expected to not be in a constant state of seething rage over it like how do you expect me to be normal in this world?#How do you expect me to stay sane? When literally even the most casually fatphobic people in the world can't understand why#fat people shouldn't have to die to save money or time or effort?
