Reason’s Brian Doherty is back at it, taking on bad medicine yet again — this time challenging the Surgeon General’s ridiculous fatwa on obesity. Writing in the L.A. Times, Doherty argues:

What the surgeon general misses is that obesity isn’t something caused by an outside pathogen or injury whose bad consequences are then unavoidable without expert medical treatment.

Obesity is a condition. It is caused by freely chosen behavior. Certainly, some real diseases, such as sexually transmitted ones, are usually also obtained by chosen behaviors. But they involve pathogens that do their thing no matter what we want. People can cure themselves of obesity by universally understood mechanisms: eating less and exercising more. Why spend tax money on a campaign against it?

Campaigns like the surgeon general’s are not harmless, even beyond the question of public funds being wasted on unnecessary purposes. By declaring conditions caused by–and reversible by–freely chosen behaviors to be diseases, the surgeon general damages the vital concept of individual responsibility

Doherty’s right. Time to put an end to the Oprah-fication of the American psyche. September 11th should’ve reminded us about what true “victimhood” is; what it most certainly isn’t is an unwillingness to avoid Nutter Butter cravings.

‘Want to stanch the “crisis” of obesity? Start telling fat jokes in public. A little well-place ridicule goes a long way.

(via the excellent Rallying Point)

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