FYI. Note, WSC not involved in wording of this CfP. Guest editors aware of problematic framing. Please contact them directly with any queries.

Call for papers for special issue of AMA Journal of Ethics, July 2023: How We Over Rely on BMI

Patients who are fat or perceived as fat are commonly characterized by many clinicians as unreliable narrators of their own health histories, and negative bias can undermine diagnoses, intervention decisions, and even what some clinicians think fat patients deserve. Fat is widely considered a clinical threat and obesity is a descriptor applied to patients with BMIs at or over 30. While weight and BMI can be helpful clinical indicators, many of its applications are overvalued, imprecise, contested, and can incur substantial iatrogenic harm. This theme issue examines clinical and ethical shortcomings of medicine’s current approach to fat.

We invite manuscripts for the July 2023 issue of the AMA Journal of Ethics^® that consider wide-ranging perspectives on interrogating BMI uses in fat persons’ marginalization as a source of iatrogenic harm and other kindred topics of clinical, ethical, social, and cultural importance.

Manuscripts submitted for peer review consideration and inclusion in this issue must follow Instructions for Authors and be submitted by 30 August 2022