I ate lunch with 2 of the EMS crew and one of our ER docs today. The conversation turned to alcohol levels, drug seekers, and morbidly obese patients sometimes all in one. Obesity is an epidemic in our country. We all know that. What some people don’t realize is how much of a strain it puts on the medical professionals who have to treat them. The EMS crew were discussing a story about how difficult it was to get a 550 lb patient out of her house last week. They had to call the fire department for lifting help as they could not even move her. They talked about a 700 lb lady we have in our community who they are just waiting to get a call on. They have a plan involving planks from the hardware store and tarps. Now before I get any nasty comments, they were not making fun of her. They seriously had to plan for how they would be able to transport this patient to receive appropriate medical care at a hospital. The challenge is if they are able to get her to the hospital, what will we put her on? Our stretchers do not accomodate her weight, neither do our hospital beds. Obesity leads to multiple medical problems, many of which you all already know so I won’t repeat or lecture. How do we solve this? Can we? I don’t think we can. But we must prepare for heavier and heavier patients as we see more of them every day. We must prepare not only for the physical demands of caring for them, but also the mental demands. We must figure out how to develop a plan of care for every other disease process that accompanies the obesity, and then we must plan how to complete the plan of care without interacting with treatments for the other diseases conditions. It’s a never ending cycle. One with a pretty scary ending.
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