My Doctor Forced Me To Do Something Disturbing. It Kept Me From Seeking Further Medical Care For Years. - HuffPost

What the report says

HuffPost published a first-person essay by Sara Knight Bidlack describing how a long-trusted primary care doctor’s insistence on weighing her during a mental health visit left her avoiding medical care for years. Bidlack writes that she sought help while caring for two young children, living through the pandemic and watching her mother undergo terminal cancer treatment. Her therapist had encouraged her to consider an SSRI, and she went to her family doctor expecting support.

According to the essay, the doctor agreed to prescribe an antidepressant but then pressed her to step on a scale after she had already declined being weighed. Bidlack says she told him her weight was similar to the last figure in her chart and that being weighed would worsen the distress that brought her in. She recounts that he continued to insist, and she ultimately complied. The experience, she writes, was not the worst treatment she had received as a fat patient, but it was the incident that made her decide not to return to that doctor and to delay other care.

Bidlack later sought evaluation for chronic lower back pain that had begun during pregnancy and worsened into a painful lump. She writes that fear of being dismissed because of her size led her to cancel and reschedule the appointment before eventually seeing a spine specialist. In that visit, she directly asked to have her pain treated as it would be for a thin patient. The specialist, reviewing an MRI, told her her pain was understandable because she had multiple herniated discs and scoliosis.

The essay frames Bidlack’s experience as part of a broader concern about weight stigma in medical settings and its potential to discourage patients from seeking needed care.