Augusta Chronicle
Copyright 2007 Southeastern Newspapers Corporation
All Rights Reserved
AUGUSTA, Maine — You may remember the old quip about the patient, bound for the hospital, who was so fat that the ambulance had to make two trips.
Not anymore.
Now there’s the bariatric ambulance, a special emergency van that is built and equipped to accommodate patients heavier than 400 pounds. An Emergency Medical Service unit in Savannah acquired one earlier this summer. The vehicle even has ramps and a winch to better load and unload its ill passengers.
When it comes to health care, the comfort and safety of the patient clearly must be a top priority. But what do these larger ambulances say about how Americans are treating themselves?
Chiefly, it says what we pretty much already know - that obesity is a burden on public health as bad as any plague. Anne Byerly, the nurse manager of Candler Hospital’s emergency department in Savannah, says national statistics show a 50 percent increase in patient size since 1991.
This isn’t some glandular thing. This isn’t a genetic thing. This is about people who simply can’t push their dinner plates aside.
And the burden of a few dozen extra pounds isn’t carried solely by the overweight person. It’s carried by taxpayers, who have to fork over tens of billions of dollars every year to fund the Medicare and Medicaid that pays to treat people with obesity-related health problems.
It’s a burden also carried by American businesses. A fat employee is likely to become an ill employee, meaning decreased productivity and missed workdays. The worker then relies on money from his increasingly poorer company’s health care plan to help cure his ailment.
There are simply no winners when it comes to obesity - unless you count the people who manufacture junk food.
Society is accommodating the obese as if body weight is something that can’t be changed. We need to foster and deeply embed a widespread desire in this country to stay healthy through moderate eating and exercise.
Instead, we’re making bigger furniture for people to sit in, and bigger ambulances for people to travel to the hospital - and bigger caskets for the day when these overweight Americans die from diabetes, cardiovascular disease or any of the several types of cancer that researchers have connected with obesity.
We’re not unsympathetic toward anyone with health problems. But it’s a strain on sympathy to feel sorry for people who can make themselves healthier and happier if they would only practice willpower and persistence.