When is the Individual’s Weight Problem the Business of Others?
A Possible Answer: When Others Find Themselves Sharing the Load
One of the tenets of the fat acceptance movement is how the overweight or obese individual conducts his or her life is his or her business and not that of experts or the media or anyone else. But that is not altogether true, as the following news item out of Columbus, Ohio illustrates.
It seems that the city’s Division of Fire, which is its firefighting and rescue department, began finding itself dealing with sick or injured citizens who were literally too heavy for the paramedics to manage with customary ambulance stretchers. So the city bought 18 heavy-duty stretchers, able to handle loads of up to 650 pounds each, and contracted for 34 more, one for every rescue unit in the city.
The tab on these stretchers came to about $5,000 each. That’s $260,000 total, at a time when Columbus, like most American cities, is desperately trying to wring money out of thin air just to stay afloat. But it gets worse. It seems that paramedics are now finding themselves confronted with patients too large even for the beefed up stretchers — on average, about twice a month.
Sharing the Load
If that frequency seems unduly nigh, bear in mind that the extremely obese are statistically more likely than average to require emergency transportation, due to their greater susceptibility to illness or injury. As a consequence, about twice a month the city is hit with health insurance claims from rescue personnel for back injuries suffered while attempting to move the super heavy.
Happily, there are even sturdier stretchers that have their own hydraulic systems and can heft loads of as much as 1,000 pounds. Not so happily, these bruisers run $10,000 or so each, and they require retrofitting of the ambulances to the tune of another $6,000 per. To its credit, the city is making every effort to buy the super stretchers, with or without help from the state of Ohio.
“Our community may have to pick up the additional cost,” acknowledged one Columbus Public Safety official. But that is what responsible communities do; they provide essential services for those who need them. Doing so is — and I choose my words specifically here — a responsible community’s business.
This is a fundamental problem facing those who advocate for the rights of the obese: to the extent that their lifestyle draws upon resources provided by others, it becomes the business of others. And that is when people who might have been indifferent or even sympathetic to the grossly overweight begin viewing them in a less charitable light.
That’s when more and more people come to the same conclusion reached by the Columbus official noted above: “Obesity is detrimental not only to the individual but society in general.”
(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
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