> As reported in the article, a patient who over the course of a week became unable to walk at all without shortness of breath. Her doctor told her to lose weight. The cause of the shortness of breath was blood clots on the lungs.

What some docs seem not to have learned is to ask the first question you learn to consider in tech support (and medicine is, in a sense, tech support for the human body) -- "what's changed?".

Unless the patient had a sudden and rapid change of weight that corresponds to the symptoms occurring, even if it is something whose onset was brought on by weight over time (or just made more likely by weight), its probably not the weight itself directly causing the symptoms, and if you don't properly diagnose the cause, you have no idea if losing weight is an appropriate remedy, irrelevant to the symptoms at hand, or something likely to cause changes in the body which exacerbate those symptoms.

What her doctor actually probably said was "the limits of what I can diagnose show that you would most likely see a great improvement with weight loss. I can refer you to a specialist who can conduct more tests (MRI etc) but those tend to be very expensive. I wouldn't recommend it without trying weight loss first, which is very important beyond the symptoms you came in for today".