From the BBC:
Being frightened of falling over is likely to increase an old person's risk of having a fall, researchers have found. The link remained even when they were not actually at a high risk, the study in the British Medical Journal found.
That really is just messing with people's minds, isn't it? Are old people supposed to convince themselves that they are not frightened of falling? What if they grow reckless and then have a fall? Who's to blame then? What about somebody who's never worried about falling anyway? Will they get overconfident?
PS, the article features rent-a-quotes from fakecharity Age UK, but does not conclude with a government spokesman saying that "More will be done" so it's possible that we can take the article at face value. It doesn't appear to be shroud waving or anything (but we will see).
Friday, 20 August 2010
That's very reassuring
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2 comments:
I suspect research fail... How did they determine risk other than measuring how many falls a person had? It looks like they measured the things that they think might cause a fall to determine risk - but that means the results are only valid if falls are caused by exactly the things that they think they are caused by.
Isn't it more likely that the people who have had falls or feel that they may have falls are more worried about them? And that the criteria for determining who is at risk were wrong?
RA, possibly, but I wasn't thinking about it that deeply.
For example, I am scared of heights. If some research showed that people who are scared of heights are more likely to fall off a high building, then that makes me even more scared of heights (even if the research is entirely unfounded).
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