Obese Patients May Be More Prone to 'Doctor Shopping'

A new study finds that people who are overweight or obese are more likely to engage in "doctor shopping" -- repeatedly changing their primary care physician. Recurrent bad experiences with doctors -- being made to feel uncomfortable during office visits -- may be to blame for the trend, the researchers said. "There's something going wrong in these doctor-patient relationships that make these switches so frequent for this group of people," study author Dr. Kimberly Gudzune, an assistant professor in the division of general internal medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said in a university news release. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_137379.html