The world is trying to kill me prematurely.

Weight stigma impacts negatively healthcare quality and hinders public health goals. The aim of this review was to identify strategies for minimizing weight bias among healthcare professionals and explore future research directions. An electronic search was performed in PubMed, PsycINFO and Scopus (until June 2020). Studies on weight stigma reduction in healthcare students, trainees and professionals were assessed based on specific inclusion and exclusion criteria. A narrative synthesis was undertaken to analyze emerging themes. We identified five stigma reduction strategies in healthcare: (i) increased education, (ii) causal information and controllability, (iii) empathy evoking, (iv) weight-inclusive approach, and (v) mixed methodology. Weight stigma needs to be addressed early on and continuously throughout healthcare education and practice, by teaching the genetic and socioenvironmental determinants of weight, and explicitly discussing the sources, impact and implications of stigma. There is a need to move away from a solely weight-centric approach to healthcare to a health-focused weight-inclusive one. Assessing the effects of weight stigma in epidemiological research is equally important. The ethical argument and evidence base for the need to reduce weight stigma in healthcare and beyond is strong. Although evidence on long-term stigma reduction is emerging, precautionary action is needed.

It gets harder to multitask as you age

The main areas of serotonin research provide no consistent evidence of there being an association between serotonin and depression, and no support for the hypothesis that depression is caused by lowered serotonin activity or concentrations.

I’ll often say something like the way Zoloft works, is, it increases the level of serotonin in your brain (or synapses, neurons) and, presumably, the reason you’re depressed or anxious is that you have some sort of a deficiency. And I say that [chuckles] not because I really believe it, because I know the evidence really isn’t there for us to understand the mechanism—I think I say that because patients want to know something. And they want to know that we as physicians have some basic understanding of what we’re doing when we’re prescribing medications. They certainly don’t want to know that a psychiatrist essentially has no idea how these medications work

The proportion of females whose ASD diagnosis is missed is unknown. The ratio of males to females with ASD is generally quoted as 4:1, though it is believed that there are biases preventing females from being diagnosed and that the true ratio is lower…. A mathematical model was constructed to compare the findings with current published data. The true male-to-female ratio appears to be 3:4. Eighty percent of females remain undiagnosed at age 18

Smith and I found that, of the nearly 1,800 articles published across the four editions of the encyclopedia, only 13 addressed racism in a substantive way.

ABOUT SEVEN YEARS AGO, Christine Metz, a biomedical researcher at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in New York, had an idea for a study of endometriosis, a painful disease in which the type of tissue that lines the uterus begins to grow on other areas of the body. Currently, a formal diagnosis requires an operation performed under general anesthetic. Metz wondered, among other things, if patients could be correctly diagnosed using a less invasive approach.

To recruit people for her study, Metz reached out to physicians, hoping they would ask their patients to participate. But the doctors balked. “’People told us, ‘Oh I can’t ask my patients to do something like that,’” she recalled, where “that” referred to providing samples of menstrual blood. “There was definitely a ‘yuck’ factor,” said Metz.

A dynamic list of ongoing fat research.

Small study, wasn’t a real campfire.

Part 3 of 3