CHICAGO (AP) — The American Medical Association has taken action to support doctors’ ability to discuss obesity with their overweight patients.

Under a new policy adopted Tuesday, the AMA formally opposes efforts by advocacy groups to define obesity as a disability.

Doctors fear using that definition makes them vulnerable under disability laws to lawsuits from obese patients who don’t want their doctors to discuss their weight.

Doctors took the action at their annual meeting in Chicago.

In other action Tuesday, the AMA agreed to lobby for legislation to ban selling tobacco in pharmacies.

Health care reform issues are slated to come up later at the meeting, which ends Wednesday.

Obviously this stirs up troubling feelings in me. I don’t think that obesity is a disability (I just call it fat anyway), but I do think that the reasons behind keeping it from becoming one are hypocritical and highly suspect (e.g. to keep doctors from getting in trouble, to prevent insurance denial, to prevent people from being able to file for disability, etc.). What are your thoughts on this and the AMA’s position?

When Obama spoke to the AMA recently about working together for health care reform, he used a form of the term “obesity epidemic.” I didn’t appreciate that, especially considering his quality stance on preventative medicine (i.e. encouraging fitness, nutrition and education about both). What did you think about this?

True story, from a few months ago. I got in trouble at work for complaining about a woman in our personnel office who sent around, as part of an employee newsletter, a bunch of truly ignorant statements about fatness and weight “loss” to all employees. The issue got escalated to the point where I wound up filing a formal discrimination complaint against her. In this case, I mentioned that the IRS considered “obesity” a disability, and that, therefore, fat people are protected from discrimination as members of a protected class. My argument was that, just as someone presuming to diagnose anyone else’s illness in the workplace, to give unsolicitied advice, or to attribute an illness to someone’s behavior (i.e. berating all HIV+ people as sexually promiscuous) would be formally reprimanded by the Department, and forbidden to violate disabled or ill employees’ privacy, so should anyone who presumes to give unsolicited advice to or make unwarranted, unsolicitied judgments about fat people be similarly instructed to stop those behaviors, or face disciplinary action.

Personnel threw the complaint out because they don’t consider fatness a disability (I agree with them, actually), and therefore fat people are not legally protected from discimination or invasion of privacy on medical matters (I think everyone’s medical information or decisions are NO ONE ELSE’S BUSINESS).

In other words, we’re only sick and disabled when it’s in the best interest of the bigots that we be found so.

I constantly wrestle with that issue: that it’s beneficial in some since for obesity to be classified as a disease because then certain advantages are required to be provided form a variety of directions, but at the same time, being fat isn’t a disease in the same way it’s not a disability. However, it is a grounds on which people are discriminated against, and just as being black or Hindu are not bad things, they are protected statuses because people discriminate on grounds of race and religion. Therefore, fat people as a protected class (no discrimination based on height and weight) I think would be awesome but I wonder if other classifications (e.g. obesity as disease or disability) might not hurt the cause more than help it.