Patients Are Hardly Too Thin or Too Rich

famously quipped, "You can never be too thin or too rich." Her comment comes to me occasionally as I care for patients at a publicly funded, inner-city clinic in San Antonio, Texas-one of the poorest, most obese cities in the country. All my patients are poor, and most suffer obesity-related diseases-especially diabetes, hypertension, and osteoarthritis. One patient I care for is a middle-aged woman with uncontrolled diabetes who is overweight. She recently quit her house-cleaning jobs due to painful foot neuropathies and now lives on her husband's small Social Security check. Another patient is an intermittently employed used-car salesman who weighs 400 pounds, eats a steady diet of fast foods, and has hypertension. A third patient is a cook who is morbidly obese and has painful, unstable osteoarthritic knees that limit her ability to work. She wants bariatric surgery but cannot afford it

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• Health Span Extension through Green Chemoprevention

  Open Access•Jed W Fahey, Thomas Kensler•The AMA Journal of Ethic•2013

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• Medical Hazards of Obesity

  Open Access•F Xavier Pi-Sunyer, F Xavier Pi‐sunyer•Annals of Internal Medicine•1993

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• The Disease Burden Associated With Overweight and Obesity

  Aviva Must•JAMA•1999

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• Gender and the Burden of Disease Attributable to Obesity

  Peter Muennig, Erica Lubetkin et al.•American Journal of Public Health•2006

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