Study of intubation showing increased risk of death if you're a fatass - Surprise! Okay, long time lurker first time poster yadda yadda. I remember the post explaining exactly why it is harder to operate on fatties. Here's is a little something explaining how that starts before  the doctor even grabs a knife.  My brother studies medicine and asked me to proofread his final assignment. It is a study of intubation (shoving a tube down the throat to help breathing) of patients, typically prior to surgery. The study compares complications in intubation in people with a BMI between 18.5 and 25 to that of severely obese patients with a BMI > 35.  The study contains more than 12,000 observations, after excluding patients with incomplete data, outside the BMI spectre and repeat patients. Roughly 10,000 are human, 2,000 carry a deathwish around their bellies. 4.8% of the obese are difficult to intubate 1.9% of the humans are difficult to intubate Here's where it gets interesting: Doctors already know that the obese are harder to intubate, so they try to predict it, and adjust accordingly by changing their procedures. But even when they do take weight, prior history, flexibility (neck) etc. into account and try to determine difficulty they still underestimate.  2.5% of the obese are difficult to intubate unexpectedly. 1.7% of the humans.  As the conclusion reads "1 in 40 severely obese patients undergoing tracheal intubation will have an unanticipated difficult tracheal intubation. As such, they are in great risk of complications to airway management which may result in morbidity and mortality." So fatties are putting themselves in a worse position even before they are cut open, as it is harder to determine difficulty and harder to actuallly intubate.  I mostly feel bad for the doctors who have to deal with this shit and get told that they should know better. Fatties are the no. 1 argument against universal health care. TL;DR: Fatties make life harder on doctors before surgery even starts, increasing their risk of dying.