Washington, Oct 23 : Doctors tend to have less respect for obese patients than patients of normal weight, suggests a new study.

Mary Margaret Huizinga, assistant professor of general internal medicine at the Johns Hopkins University, says the idea for the research came from her experiences working in a weight loss clinic.

Patients would come in and "by the end of the visit would be in tears, saying no other physician talked with me like this before. No one listened to me", says Huizinga, who led the study.

"Many patients felt like because they were overweight, they weren't receiving the type of care other patients received," she says.

Data was collected from 238 patients at 14 urban community medical practices in Baltimore. Patients and physicians completed questionnaires about their visit, their attitudes, and their perceptions of one another upon the completion of the encounter.

On average, the patients for whom physicians expressed low respect had higher body mass index (BMI or height to weight ratio) than patients for whom they had high respect.

Previous studies have shown that when physicians respect their patients, patients get more information from their doctors.

Some patients who don't feel respected may avoid the health care system altogether, surveys and focus groups have shown. One limitation of the new study, Huizinga says, is that it was unable to link low physician respect directly to poor health outcomes.

"The next step is to really understand how physician attitudes toward obesity affect quality of care for those patients, to really understand how this affects outcomes," Huizinga says.

Ultimately, she says, physicians need to be educated that obesity bias and discrimination exist. One good place to start would be in medical school, where Huizinga says little is taught to reduce or compensate for these negative attitude, says a Johns Hopkins release.

The study is slated for publication in the November issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine. (IANS)