No. 6, Spring 2022
Medical fatphobia isn’t the result of providers not knowing the cheat codes for working with fat patients. Doctors didn’t all miss the day in medical school where students were taught how not to be cruel to fat people. Fatphobia is medicine’s status quo. Spring 2022’s feature:
Marquisele Mercedes
6,187 words | a 26-minute read
Hello again, or for the first time. Here’s a small welcome from a big editor.
There’s some full-bodied conversation here.
Pun fully intended.
Monica Kriete reframes the public health crisis: it’s not an obesity epidemic, it’s an anti-fatness epidemic.
Michelle Weber wants you to try and make sense of a lifetime of medical malpractice. (Spoilers: you can’t!)
Victoria Abraham on summers at Bulgarian fat camp, the ovary she hardly knew, and the doctors who wouldn’t listen.
Chef Fresh Roberson finds that care and community can help mitigate our deepest fears, one act of love at a time.
Caroline Moore, mom and fat person, writes to a daughter who’s still whole, but on the precipice of diet culture.
Katta Spiel is in the waiting room, preparing to have their needs overlooked and their worries ignored. Again.
Athia Choudhury questions our investment in thinness. Who is made happier or freer when we thwart our own appetites?
Ali Thompson takes down diet culture with its own trappings, plus construction paper, scissors, and a glue stick.
Each issue of Pipe Wrench publishes one great longform piece paired with reactions, digressions, asides, and ephemera: the unforgettable story, the excited conversation, and the 3AM rabbit hole, all in one. Made by people given fair pay and contracts, and supported editorially and as human beings.
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Cigarettes? Meth? Mystery “treatment”? Physical mutilation?
“If you want to challenge fatphobia, you have to start with the understanding that fat people are worthy of respect, safety, and dignity. A ‘but’ cannot follow this statement.”
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