#tell me you've never done anatomical dissection without telling me you've never done anatomical dissection

[mangled-by-disuse]

also like if I may weigh in as someone who did their third-year anatomy project on a fat cadaver

uh

it's fine?

like i'm not saying i loved the amount of adipose (i.e. fat) tissue I had to remove to access the chest cavity (especially since it took up a LOT of embalming fluid so it was quite liquid a lot of the time), and it definitely required more work to access than a thinner cadaver might have. But ultimately, the hardest part of that project wasn't "oh no the cadaver is fat", it was "oh no I've never had to remove ribs before and I somehow wasn't prepared for this to involve pliers".

also, honestly, the parts of that cadaver with the most fat (breasts and jaw - I was dissecting for the laryngeal nerve, which is in the neck, so I didn't go below the first two ribs) were actually the easiest parts to remove the adipose tissue from, because you could do it in lumps. The hard parts to deal with are the thinner or visceral fat patches, because those are more delicate work - but you also don't know those are there until you get to them, because they're not visible from the outside and are just as likely to be significant in a skinny person as a fat one. (also they tend to be around the delicate structures you're looking for, whereas the fat which is most affected by being fat is the large areas immediately under the skin, like the belly and breasts and butt, which is on top of the core structures so it's easier to remove without needing to be super delicate.)

meanwhile the other person who had the laryngeal nerve project was working with a cadaver which had almost no body fat at all and she did NOT seem to be finding it significantly easier.

Time-wise, I actually finished my project second out of a class of 12, by the way, and did extra work on it (the chest investigation wasn't in the original plan, I just hit a point where I'd fully dissected and recorded the neck and throat and I still had four lab sessions left). Almost like the weight of a cadaver doesn't correlate directly to how long it takes to dissect. go figure.

The reason fat cadavers are not accepted for medical programmes is that you need to cut through every layer of fat carefully. Which takes time, and lab sessions are inherentely limited in that. It's better for med students to spend that time looking at what organs actually look like in bodies. This isn't fatphobia, it's just .. the way dissecting bodies works? In the same way surgeries on fat people take longer because there's just physically more tissue. The alternative would be to force the med students who get fatter cadavers to do more lab sessions at weird times outside of the usual schedules. Or force them to stay over the holidays. Or not let them get enough time to do the lab work they need to. Which imo would be a bit fucked up especially when med school is already so difficult and time-consuming.

It’s fatphobia. Fat bodies absolutely need to be studied. To ignore an entire demographic of oppressed individuals in the medical field for the sake of convenience(?!) is violence. Did you even read the article? They called working on fat cadavers “unpleasant.” It’s fatphobia and it’s unacceptable.