Doctor's obesity 'diatribe' detailed
Bennett says he was taken out of context
By ANNE RUDERMAN
Monitor staff
December 20. 2005 8:00AM
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Dr. Terry Bennett
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The woman who filed a complaint with the state board of medicine, alleging that Dr. Terry Bennett said she was so fat only a "black guy" might like her, just got the standard version of "Dr. Bennett's diatribe on obesity," Bennett said in an interview yesterday. He said the quote included in her complaint condensed his philosophy and took it out of context.
Bennett, who runs his own family practice in Rochester, said he delivers the same speech to all of his overweight female patients, warning them that not only their health, but their personal lives are at stake if they do not tackle their weight problem. The talk and the logic behind it, according to Bennett, go like this:
Overweight men are much more likely to die than overweight women, so an overweight woman married to an overweight man risks being an early widow. American men "don't like obese women,"Bennett said - except one group: African-American men. But because there's a general dearth of single middle-aged African-American men in New Hampshire, the woman is likely to end up on her own.
"Black men are the only males that don't have a strong anti-obesity preference," he said. "They mostly grow up in fatherless households where they are surrounded by big, loving women, and they talk about fat as sugar."
Bennett said his logic is racial - the way medical issues like diabetes can be linked to race - and not racist.
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"The notion that a black person would find you attractive while a white person of the same age and same gender would not, that's a fact," he said. "If you are going to pick that apart and charge that statement is racist, I subject that you are the racist."
Bennett has been charged with professional misconduct after a 2004 complaint accused him of berating a woman for being overweight and another complaint accused him of telling another woman her medical situation was so hopeless she should buy a gun and kill herself. His case is currently before the Board of Medicine, which is weighing a motion to dismiss.
In the obesity complaint, Bennett is quoted as saying: "If your husband were to die tomorrow -who would want you? . . . Well, men might want you, but not the types that you want to want you -Might even be a black guy!"
But Bennett said that quote condensed his speech into a sentence and didn't give it the broad context it deserves. He said he didn't treat the woman any differently than he treats any of his overweight female patients -which is to take a hard line.
"Everyone else in the practice who's an obese female gets the same lecture. This woman was looking to be offended and get out of the situation. . . . We call this denial," he said.
Bennett said that his argument about men not wanting overweight women is backed up by research and said the "Technicolor" nature of his Rochester practice supports the idea that he is not a racist. He also pointed to his work as the bin Laden family doctor in Saudi Arabia and his practice there as further evidence that he's multicultural.
"If I was such a prejudiced person why did I have 50,000 charts in Saudi Arabia? They were all brown," he said.
But the Rev. Arthur Hilson, a leader in the African-American community in Portsmouth, said Bennett was perpetuating old cultural stereotypes of African Americans, such as the "mammy"image of the "heavyset woman with a bandana wrapped around her head." Moreover, Hilson said, he didn't understand what the place of race was in a question of a woman's weight and her health.
"Black women come in all sizes and shapes, just like white women and Asian women," he said. "If the issue is health and weight, what do black people or black men's preference have to do with health?"
New Hampshire NAACP coordinator Fred Ross's suggestion was even more straightforward "Maybe he needs to be sent to a school for tact and diplomacy. That's a lot of hooey."
Although the motion to dismiss is still pending, Bennett and his supporters - the "Have Nots for Dr. Bennett"- won a small victory last week when the Merrimack County Superior Court ruled that the Board of Medicine could not make as many of its meetings closed to the public. Bennett has also applied to be the state medical director.
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