CHICAGO, Ill. – A study conducted by the American Medical Association (AMA) suggests that grossly overweight women are more likely to skip treatment for conditions that can normally be alleviated with antibiotics.
The study, sponsored by WalMart Inc. and Lane Bryant, found that overweight women often skip appointments to receive posterior injections of antibiotics because they are afraid the needles used in those injections accentuate the size of their buttocks.
“Large women ask me all the time, ‘Does this needle make my butt look big?'” said Yow Lu Ming, M.D., an internist in private practice in Philadelphia.
“I assure them it doesn’t, but they are not convinced. I never see most of them again.”
Although the AMA study did not compare recovery times of women who received antibiotics to those who did not, anecdotal evidence suggests that avoiding antibiotics can have serious effects. Cyndi Bacon, thirty-two, of State College, Pennsylvania, lost feeling in the entire left side of her body after she had stopped visiting her doctor for antibiotic injections to combat Lyme disease.
“It was just too humiliating,” said Bacon. “Those Oriental doctors are all so skinny. I knew he had to be grossed out because my butt weighs more than his entire body.”
According to A. Lester Scruggs, M.D., a general practitioner in Enid, Oklahoma, “Your basic hypodermic, which runs anywheres from .75 to 1.5 inches (19 to 38 mm), is gonna look like a needle in a haystack in some woman whose butt has its own ZIP code. If you want to deliver an effective dose of antibiotic in them haunches, you’ve got to get Black & Decker involved.”
To add insult to injection, another study—this one conducted at the Adelaide and Meath Hospital in Dublin, Ireland—demonstrated that a majority of overweight women are not getting the proper dosage from injections into the buttocks. Therefore, women with a negative body image will be disinclined to suffer indignities for naught.
“There is no question that obesity is the underlying cause,” said Victoria I. Ching, M.B., who headed the study. “A needle that is effective on Nicole Richie is not going to be as effective on Kirstie Alley.”
Dr. Ching’s team recruited fifty male and female patients, aged twenty-one to eighty-seven, and injected a small air bubble into the subjects’ buttocks using a standard-sized needle. The researchers then analyzed computer images to determine the location of the air bubbles. They found that standard needles penetrated fat and reached muscle tissue—where antibiotics have to be deposited in order to be most effective—in only 8 percent of the women. The success rate in men was 56 per cent. Because fat tissue has significantly fewer blood vessels than muscle, a drug injected into fat is less likely to be absorbed into the bloodstream.
Dr. Ching recommended overcoming “the fat barrier” by using 3.0-inch (super-petite) and 4.5-inch (ultra-petite) needles, but HMO executives in the United States warn that the increase in needle sizes could add $15 to $20 billion to our nation’s already overburdened health-care costs.
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