This woman's body-shaming doctor missed the fact she had cancer

Rebecca Hiles was body-shamed by her doctors for years, told that her health problems were simply to do with her weight.

By the time a CT scan revealed a tumour in her bronchial tube – six years after she had complained of breathing issues – she needed surgery to remove her entire left lung. She was 23 at the time, and had been repeatedly dismissed by medical professionals since the age of 17.

Her story, one of many discussed by author and journalist Maya Dusenberry in her book Doing Harm, is sadly not uncommon.

Dusenberry points out that in a size-phobic society, women's health issues are often missed, misdiagnosed or flat-out ignored if they are seen to be overweight.

Hiles' life and relationships in her early twenties were ruined by constant, painful coughing, but she was led to believe that if she just lost weight, things would somehow sort themselves out.

RELATED: Plus-size model: 'Stop telling me to lose weight'

This was despite the fact she had begun to cough blood – not to mention suffer from secondary complications caused by the coughing, including the inconvenient and stressful problem of incontinence.

When she was finally diagnosed, Hiles wrote on her blog, she was filled with "complete and utter rage".

"I remembered being consistently told that the reason I was sick was because I was fat," she wrote.

"Were it not for physicians that saw me as a person, rather than seeing my fat as something to treat, I very well may have stopped seeking medical treatment, thinking that I was simply mentally ill. I could have died."

RELATED: My son was fat-shamed by a doctor

"We tend to trust doctors’ science as objective and their clinical judgments as impartial," Dusenberry writes for Cosmopolitan.

"But the alarming truth is that medicine reflects the biases of the culture at large."