“Medicalizing our social problems isnt healthy. It undermines personal responsibility and renders important character-building virtues such as self-restraint and discipline hopelessly passé,” says Wesley J. Smith in today’s column . “Lowering expectations for individual behavior is the real ‘disease.’”
The American Medical Association has now declared obesitynot just the maladies it can cause, such as type 2 diabetesa disease . . . . Redefining obesity into a disease illustrates how the powers-that-be believe we lack capacity to keep ourselves well. We need the experts to do it for us.The AMAs embrace of obesity as a disease should be seen as part of a far larger international effort to link the problem to other imperatives supposedly requiring bureaucratic solutions, like global warming. For example, a proposalfunded by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundationwas published in the medical journal The Lancet (August 2011)offering technocratic policy remedies in the U.N. to prevent obesity that were nearly identical to policy agendas to combat climate change. . . . what we see here is a large helping of politics, not just science.
Read the full column here .