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Obese people not obese any more, according to NICE
4 February 2025
NHS staff have been told not to call obese people “obese” by the medicines watchdog.
In the latest version of its inclusive language guide, the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has listed a series of seemingly straightforward words and descriptions to be avoided when talking about patients.
The guide, published last month by the taxpayer-funded quango, warns medics against using “obese”. Instead, they should describe the overweight as “people with obesity”. It also warns against using “diabetic”, “alcoholic” and “smoker”, in favour of “people with diabetes”, “people who are dependent on alcohol” and “people who smoke”.
Other banned words include “homeless”, which is replaced by “people experiencing homelessness” – while “disadvantaged people” become “people who are underserved”.
The guide claims that it is “good manners” to use such “person-centred” alternatives because they don’t indicate that a condition is “what a person is”. Or, as it further elaborates: “Diseases are treated, not people. Diseases, not people, respond to treatment. Conditions, not people, are monitored.”
Sadly, according to FSU’s General Secretary Toby Young, the NICE advice will be a “fat lot of help”.
“The obsessive language policing by woke mandarins is symptomatic of the intellectual vacuity of the progressive Left, who now think that the way to help disadvantaged people – sorry, the ‘underserved’ – is to relabel them in a more politically correct way,” he told the Telegraph.
“A fat lot of help that will be, if I’m allowed to use that word. What a ‘person with obesity’ needs is not a nice new label, but a GP appointment so they can get a prescription for Ozempic.”
Dr Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, Director of the campaign group Don’t Divide Us, agreed with Toby. “Most of us know that a diabetic or an alcoholic is a person,” she pointed out, adding: “The NHS leadership seem more interested in policing language than improving either health care or the quality of management and leadership.
“Beyond silliness, these initiatives ultimately have a demoralising effect as many switch off internally lest they find themselves on the wrong side of the moral entrepreneurs.”
For many of us, the obvious response to the latest NICE guide might be either an eye-roll or a belly laugh. However, the reality is that such nonsense can too easily morph into an informal – or even a formal – speech code, with all the risks that carries, in the messy realities of our increasingly nervous workplaces, of not-so-funny disciplinary action.
Full story here.
Worried that NICE's ban on words like 'obese' and 'diabetic' is turning clinical language into a political minefield — and putting NHS staff at risk of discipline for using accurate medical terms?
The FSU opposes language codes that turn everyday professional vocabulary into a compliance trap — because when doctors can't call a condition by its name, it's patients, not sensitivities, that suffer. Join 40,000+ members. From £29.99/year.
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