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Obesity And Its Effects On Obesity Essay

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Obesity is a prevalent condition in America that undeniably leads to a plethora of health complications, including heart disease, diabetes, and depression. However, while medical interventions can be useful for addressing obesity, treating it as a purely medical condition can decontextualize this growing issue. Additionally, it can support the use of ineffective but potentially harmful treatments by a group of disproportionately empowered medical professionals and industries, that are incentivized to maximize their profit. Obesity exists in the context of a society that moralizes eating habits and stigmatizes fat bodies, and the medicalization of obesity impacts not only those who are obese, but also those who become obsessed with avoiding obesity. Combatting obesity is hence a complex problem that should be treated with both medical and societal interventions, and a failure to do so will result in serious consequences. Medicalization is the process of defining a condition in medical terms, and using medical interventions to treat it (Conrad 3). The medicalization of obesity gives medical professionals and related industries authority over the definition and treatment of obesity, which incentivizes doctors to maximize their profit by expanding the meaning of obesity, and by treating it in a medical setting. Harriet Brown states that bringing obesity under the medical realm allowed doctors to profit from its treatment, which made them open to performing radical procedures

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