Clever coves, those Indian doctors ...
From the BBC:
People of South Asian origin are more likely than white people to develop heart disease and diabetes. To reflect this, Indian health chiefs have changed their measuring system and said other countries should follow suit for people of South Asian origin...
Standards used around the world to tell when someone is overweight or obese are based on data from Caucasians. These state that people with a body mass index (BMI) - calculated using weight and height - of 25 or more are overweight. They are obese if it goes above 30.
In India those limits have been lowered to 23 and 25, to reflect the risks for their own population. They also have lower thresholds for waist circumference measurements.
The move has in effect led to an extra 70 million people being re-classified as overweight or obese. This means that doctors in India are encouraged to intervene earlier, sometimes with drugs or surgery.
Stormlight
5 hours ago
4 comments:
"Standards used around the world to tell when someone is overweight or obese are based on data from Caucasians." I'm willing to bet that that is untrue. I suspect that it should read "Standards used around the world to tell when someone is overweight or obese are based on arbitrary Puritanism".
Sounds like a nice funding grab to me. You'll need a lot more doctors to cope with the extra 70 million.
Why not just admit that BMI indexes are biased towards healthy people and should be recalibrated based on fat people so that nobody is classfied as obsese and thus we are all happy in the socialist paradise?
I'm actually starting to develop some sympathy for salad dodgers, now that the Righteous are coming after them
Not necessarily a funding grab; more of a prescribing one.
Xenical, the popular drug which prevents fat absorption by binding on to the fat receptors in the gut wall, is prescribed from a BMI of 30.
If you lower the BMI to 25, you can make millions of extra sales, either privately, through the over-the-counter version Alli, or or via state funding on the prescription version Xenical.
Here's the full BMI chart
http://www.xenical.com/tools/bmi_chart_frameset.htm
The orange and light green areas all become potential sales, depending on how you set the cut-off levels.
{tongue firmly in cheek}
That's it! Yet another measure to make it easier for asians to access services from the NHS while white people have to wait for longer .. .. ..
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