Sunday, September 7, 2008

Good News, For Once!

First, apologies to anybody who is still reading this blog for my several-month-hiatus! Over that period, I gave two talks about HAES topics: one to my medical student peers, and one to some philosophy grad students. Both went over very well! It was nice to find a receptive audience for these ideas.

Third Day Back

We managed to get through two whole days of school this semester without mention of the Scary Obesity Epidemic. On the third day, our final lecture about health care spending and cost analysis was nearly over when the professor decided to use an example of how fat people are going to bankrupt us. After all, the obesity epidemic is no doubt going to cost a fortune because of diabetes and other necessary interventions. And just to make sure that our evidence-based-medicine week had some not-remotely-evidence-based comments, he added that exercise programs for kids that reduce obesity later are likely to have a great return on investment these days.

He really ought to read Junk Food Science occasionally, where he could learn things like childhood obesity prevention programs don't work, or that there's really no evidence that fat people are going to cost more, and being fat may actually save the health care system money.