Ginny Ramseyer Winter Quoted in The New York Times
Associate Professor Ginny Ramseyer Winter was quoted in the news article “In Some Doctors’ Offices, the Weigh-In Is No Longer Required,” published Thursday, December 26 in The New York Times.
The in-depth article, which examines the reasons that some doctor’s offices are no longer weighing patients and others are giving patients the choice to decline being weighted, cited Ramseyer Winter’s 2023 research paper “The Role of Body Image and Refusal to be Weighed: Implications for Primary Healthcare,” which was published in the Annals of Family Medicine journal.
Ramseyer Winter and her coauthors uncovered patient motivations to refuse being weighed in a doctor’s office, which included negative impact on their mental health, concerns about the patient-provider relationship, prior negative experiences, and more.
In the article, Times journalists noted that obese women skipped the most cancer screenings despite strong evidence linking obesity and cancer.
“Folks are avoiding health care to avoid the scale, for a lot of reasons,” said Ginny Ramseyer Winter, the author of that study and an associate professor at the University of Minnesota.
“They don’t want to see the number. And they’re missing out sometimes on lifesaving preventive care just because they don’t want to be weighed,” she said.