Thin or Thick, Real or Ideal: How Thinking Through Fatness Can Help Us See the Dangers of Idealized Conceptions of Patients, Providers, Health, and Disease

This chapter argues that the way health care providers, bioethicists, and public health experts approach health relies on ideal theory despite the heavy knowledge that this world will never be ideal, and outlines the weakness of ideal theory in general and with respect to theories of health.