he woman had dropped out of the weight-loss study. So had a frustratingly high number of other patients, most of whom seemed to be succeeding at losing weight before quitting. This confused Vincent J. Felitti, the doctor leading the 1980s study.
So he began interviewing the dropouts, using a series of questions designed to create a timeline of their lives and weight history. The woman's answer to one of them would help set Felitti on a far different course, inspiring decades of work he'd never anticipated.
How much did you weigh when you became sexually active? Felitti asked.
“She said, ‘40 pounds,’ started crying and blurted out, ‘It was with my father,’” he recalled.
In his career as a physician and head of the department of preventive medicine at Kaiser Permanente in California, Felitti had rarely come across a patient with a history of incest. But by the end of 186 interviews, 55 percent of the obesity patients had reported being sexually abused. Worried he’d somehow biased the responses, Felitti asked five other people to interview another 100 patients. Their results were the same.
He was puzzled. Could this be possible?
[For more of this story, written by Arielle Levin Becker, go to http://ctmirror.org/the-long-r...of-childhood-trauma/]
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