No, not the British budget airline – Body Mass Index. It raised its silly head again today when some brainless council somewhere was forced to apologise for writing to a boy’s parents, telling them he was clinically overweight. He’d failed a BMI test, and you can’t get much worse than that, now can you?
Some years ago the British medical establishment decided this would be the definitive way of assessing obesity. There’s no complicated formula involved; it’s simply the ratio of weight to height - nothing more than that. And because it’s nothing more than that, it’s quite meaningless when taken in isolation, and quite unfit to be used as a judge of anything. It is true that obese people have a high BMI, but so do heavily muscled and big boned people. A doctor friend of mine agrees with this, but the British medical establishment does so like to play the rule-by-numbers game, and so they’re sticking with it.
It gets sillier...
A couple of years ago the British Army decided it must use BMI as one of its list of entry criteria. Anybody with an index above their set limit was automatically excluded because they were ‘obese’ and therefore unfit for the rigorous life of a soldier. It meant that a lot of fit, well muscled young men were being denied entry to the army based on a false assumption of obesity.
Now, wouldn’t you think the army would have doctors with eyes who could look at these men and say ‘Hang on a minute, this man isn’t obese, he’s just very well muscled. He’s exactly what we need, so why are we refusing to let him join?’ Well, maybe that’s exactly what did happen, because the army saw the error of its ways and changed the rules.
Did they scrap the BMI test? No. What they did was increase the level that was deemed acceptable. So now there are still fit, well muscled young men being refused entry to the army, but more genuinely obese young men being let in.
Why do I continue to be surprised by the sheer mind-boggling incompetence of people running the show over here? I really should be used to it by now, shouldn’t I?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
The sheer mind boggling incompetence of people always exceeds expectation.
Rebel, is this a mystery solved? Are you from Virginia? I remember once being moored next to an American warship called the USS Newport News. We all wondered why a ship would be named after a newspaper. It was years later that I discovered it was port in Virginia.
What makes you think that?
Well, I believe there IS a paper called the Newport News in Newport News, but mainly it's the port.
Post a Comment