4 ms·

This makes no sense. If your population is fat, doesn't it make sense to study fat people? > The reasons are largely practical ones. Most medical school tables

by fny 4y ago

This makes no sense. If your population is fat, doesn't it make sense to study fat people? > The reasons are largely practical ones. Most medical school tables are not large enough to accommodate a human being larger than 200 lbs or longer than 6' tall. > Donated bodies also have to be moved by students and/or researchers, and heavier bodies are harder to move, posing injury risk. These also seem like bad reasons. Why not dismember the body? Why not use them for crash tests or other cadaver-driven science?

oifjsidjf 4y ago
- cjbest 4y ago
  Yes?
- DoktorDelta 4y ago
  If your population is drinking Cyanide, then the issue is obviously systemic and studying their bodies may uncover a more exact cause.
  - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
    But we know the exact cause... calories (food full of calories, ie. sugar and fat) tastes good, because historically when we found a calorie-rich source of nutrients, it was good for our survival to eat as much as we could (because who knows when will we get the next portion of food). We've had enough (and too much) food for maybe a 100 years, even less in some places, and evolution cannot adapt so fast, especially since most fat people die old enough to create new babies before that.
    - zerohp 4y ago
      We don't know why everyone suddenly decided to eat a lot more calories starting around 1980. It's not even clear that people are eating more calories than in 1880. Food was abundant in the US for most people long before that.
      - numpad0 4y ago
        We also don’t do cost/benefit analysis of life expectancy and productivity. It’s a horrible thought, but there could be positive financial effects in so-called obesity.
        roywiggins 4y ago
        An effect like that has been found with smoking: "due to a shorter lifespan of 8.6 years, smokers’ mean total healthcare costs during the entire study period were actually €4700 lower than for non-smokers. For the same reason, each smoker missed 7.3 years (€126 850) of pension. Overall, smokers’ average net contribution to the public finance balance was €133 800 greater per individual compared with non-smokers." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3533014/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3533014/
        numpad0 4y ago
        Smoking at least had only downsides, we don’t know if obesity and sources of obesity has positive performance impacts, like X kg of weight correlating to Y dollars more per hour, of course after normalized by roles.
      - Wyoming23 4y ago
        It seems like we do know all the reasons though? It's multiple factors, but they're all mostly easy to observe, measure and identify. High-sugar, high-fat, packaged foods with preservatives, emulsifiers and artificial colors became cheap, abundant and normalized. These are essentially the perfect cocktail for obesity (by perfectly mixing calories, insulin response, gut microbiome changes, satiety, dopaminergic effects, etc). Simultaneously fewer Americans are working physical jobs, the jobs that are physical have reduced physicality and society in general has shifted to more car-centric and sedentary leisure (watching TV instead of going fishing on Saturday). Finally social changes. Women's liberation movement means more dual income households (and single adult households) which means less cooking from scratch and more fast food, packages food, etc. Also strong anti-bullying, body-positivity and self-esteem cultural norms prevent people from getting any peer feedback about their health/weight until it's a doctor telling them that they have diabetes and high blood pressure.
    - jacobolus 4y ago
      There are very significant regional differences in obesity, for which “access to cheap, good tasting food” is not in itself a sufficient causal explanation.
- jacobolus 4y ago
  If people start drinking cyanide in mass, there are definitely a number of important things to study there, including (a) what led them to drink cyanide, (b) why didn’t they hear or accept counter-messaging advising them that drinking cyanide is a bad idea, (c) what are the effects on the body of drinking various amounts of cyanide, etc. This seems like an invented absurdity, but consider that people in the past few years tried a wide variety of “snake oil” prophylactics/treatments for Covid, including drinking bleach, snorting cocaine, and taking oleandrin (a poison with no known health benefits promoted by officials in the Trump administration), chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine (a malaria treatment), ivermectin (an antiparasitic), etc., even when these had been shown ineffective and were being actively discouraged by health officials. Of even broader impact (hundreds of thousands of extra lives lost in the USA, possibly millions worldwide), many people refused Covid vaccines under a variety of crank theories, driven by a large and organized disinformation campaign. Studying what happened and figuring out how to do better next time should be a significant priority for health research.
cgb223 4y ago
Sounds like there’s a business opportunity here to make larger medical school tables with wheels to easily move patients
- Manu40 4y ago
  Actually, if I remember correctly; Covid already made that a thing in some ways. Back during the pandemic, they had to figure out some way to turn over patients that were infected and too big to move easily; so a specialized gurney was created. (I think they are called gurney's but am not 100% sure.)
  - masklinn 4y ago
    Note that the article predates Covid by 3 years.
    - Manu40 4y ago
      Fair enough, thanks for pointing that out.
- swayvil 4y ago
  I will compete with your BIGTABLE.COM company by creating EZCORPSESPLITTER.COM
  - cgb223 4y ago
    It’s like microservices vs a monolith but the server is a corpse
masklinn 4y ago
> This makes no sense. If your population is fat, doesn't it make sense to study fat people? It makes a lot of sense, operating on obese patients is a lot more complicated than on regular patients, and so would dissecting one. That's like reading an article about how learning to weld has become complicated in florida because the state's underwater, and your reply being "This makes no sense, if you're under water doesn't it make sense to learn underwater welding?" But underwater welding adds a ton of complexity to what you're trying to learn. You don't try to do that when trying to learn the basics and are probably already overwhelmed. In the same way you don't learn a new programming language by switching your editor to windings and RTL.
Jabbles 4y ago
> Why not dismember the body? Why not use them for crash tests or other cadaver-driven science? Oh HN. Medical schools aren't just some kind of cadaver multiplexer, farming them out to other industries that want one for "crash tests". If you want your body to be used for "crash tests", say so, and then hope your body meets the requirements of that industry.
- nostromo 4y ago
  Shockingly, that has recently been found to be true in some cases. “Arizona man finds out mother’s body donated to science was sold to be used in IED blast test” https://www.newsweek.com/donated-body-sold-army-brc-arizona-1451846 https://www.newsweek.com/donated-body-sold-army-brc-arizona-... "Dismembered limbs sewn together like 'Frankenstein' at body-parts donation center, FBI found" https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dismembered-body-parts-sewn-together-frankenstein-donation-center-fbi-found-n1035131 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dismembered-body-parts-... Here's a comprehensive overview of the problem from Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-bodybrokers-industry/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-body...
  - blairbeckwith 4y ago
    This is now my dying wish.
  - dehrmann 4y ago
    Cue Adam Savage saying "for science!" But I dunno, it could save some soldiers' lives. It's only outrageous until you think it through.
    - msrenee 4y ago
      >Jim Stauffer signed a form authorizing medical research on his mother’s body. He also checked a box prohibiting military, traffic-safety and other non-medical experiments. That's where it crosses the line between unfortunate and immoral.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

by fny 4y ago

oifjsidjf 4y ago

cjbest 4y ago
Yes?
DoktorDelta 4y ago
If your population is drinking Cyanide, then the issue is obviously systemic and studying their bodies may uncover a more exact cause.
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  But we know the exact cause... calories (food full of calories, ie. sugar and fat) tastes good, because historically when we found a calorie-rich source of nutrients, it was good for our survival to eat as much as we could (because who knows when will we get the next portion of food). We've had enough (and too much) food for maybe a 100 years, even less in some places, and evolution cannot adapt so fast, especially since most fat people die old enough to create new babies before that.
  - zerohp 4y ago
    We don't know why everyone suddenly decided to eat a lot more calories starting around 1980. It's not even clear that people are eating more calories than in 1880. Food was abundant in the US for most people long before that.
    - numpad0 4y ago
      We also don’t do cost/benefit analysis of life expectancy and productivity. It’s a horrible thought, but there could be positive financial effects in so-called obesity.
      - roywiggins 4y ago
        An effect like that has been found with smoking: "due to a shorter lifespan of 8.6 years, smokers’ mean total healthcare costs during the entire study period were actually €4700 lower than for non-smokers. For the same reason, each smoker missed 7.3 years (€126 850) of pension. Overall, smokers’ average net contribution to the public finance balance was €133 800 greater per individual compared with non-smokers." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3533014/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3533014/
        numpad0 4y ago
        Smoking at least had only downsides, we don’t know if obesity and sources of obesity has positive performance impacts, like X kg of weight correlating to Y dollars more per hour, of course after normalized by roles.
    - Wyoming23 4y ago
      It seems like we do know all the reasons though? It's multiple factors, but they're all mostly easy to observe, measure and identify. High-sugar, high-fat, packaged foods with preservatives, emulsifiers and artificial colors became cheap, abundant and normalized. These are essentially the perfect cocktail for obesity (by perfectly mixing calories, insulin response, gut microbiome changes, satiety, dopaminergic effects, etc). Simultaneously fewer Americans are working physical jobs, the jobs that are physical have reduced physicality and society in general has shifted to more car-centric and sedentary leisure (watching TV instead of going fishing on Saturday). Finally social changes. Women's liberation movement means more dual income households (and single adult households) which means less cooking from scratch and more fast food, packages food, etc. Also strong anti-bullying, body-positivity and self-esteem cultural norms prevent people from getting any peer feedback about their health/weight until it's a doctor telling them that they have diabetes and high blood pressure.
  - jacobolus 4y ago
    There are very significant regional differences in obesity, for which “access to cheap, good tasting food” is not in itself a sufficient causal explanation.
jacobolus 4y ago
If people start drinking cyanide in mass, there are definitely a number of important things to study there, including (a) what led them to drink cyanide, (b) why didn’t they hear or accept counter-messaging advising them that drinking cyanide is a bad idea, (c) what are the effects on the body of drinking various amounts of cyanide, etc. This seems like an invented absurdity, but consider that people in the past few years tried a wide variety of “snake oil” prophylactics/treatments for Covid, including drinking bleach, snorting cocaine, and taking oleandrin (a poison with no known health benefits promoted by officials in the Trump administration), chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine (a malaria treatment), ivermectin (an antiparasitic), etc., even when these had been shown ineffective and were being actively discouraged by health officials. Of even broader impact (hundreds of thousands of extra lives lost in the USA, possibly millions worldwide), many people refused Covid vaccines under a variety of crank theories, driven by a large and organized disinformation campaign. Studying what happened and figuring out how to do better next time should be a significant priority for health research.

cgb223 4y ago

Sounds like there’s a business opportunity here to make larger medical school tables with wheels to easily move patients

Manu40 4y ago
Actually, if I remember correctly; Covid already made that a thing in some ways. Back during the pandemic, they had to figure out some way to turn over patients that were infected and too big to move easily; so a specialized gurney was created. (I think they are called gurney's but am not 100% sure.)
- masklinn 4y ago
  Note that the article predates Covid by 3 years.
  - Manu40 4y ago
    Fair enough, thanks for pointing that out.
swayvil 4y ago
I will compete with your BIGTABLE.COM company by creating EZCORPSESPLITTER.COM
- cgb223 4y ago
  It’s like microservices vs a monolith but the server is a corpse

masklinn 4y ago

> This makes no sense. If your population is fat, doesn't it make sense to study fat people? It makes a lot of sense, operating on obese patients is a lot more complicated than on regular patients, and so would dissecting one. That's like reading an article about how learning to weld has become complicated in florida because the state's underwater, and your reply being "This makes no sense, if you're under water doesn't it make sense to learn underwater welding?" But underwater welding adds a ton of complexity to what you're trying to learn. You don't try to do that when trying to learn the basics and are probably already overwhelmed. In the same way you don't learn a new programming language by switching your editor to windings and RTL.

Jabbles 4y ago

> Why not dismember the body? Why not use them for crash tests or other cadaver-driven science? Oh HN. Medical schools aren't just some kind of cadaver multiplexer, farming them out to other industries that want one for "crash tests". If you want your body to be used for "crash tests", say so, and then hope your body meets the requirements of that industry.

nostromo 4y ago
Shockingly, that has recently been found to be true in some cases. “Arizona man finds out mother’s body donated to science was sold to be used in IED blast test” https://www.newsweek.com/donated-body-sold-army-brc-arizona-1451846 https://www.newsweek.com/donated-body-sold-army-brc-arizona-... "Dismembered limbs sewn together like 'Frankenstein' at body-parts donation center, FBI found" https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dismembered-body-parts-sewn-together-frankenstein-donation-center-fbi-found-n1035131 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dismembered-body-parts-... Here's a comprehensive overview of the problem from Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-bodybrokers-industry/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-body...
- blairbeckwith 4y ago
  This is now my dying wish.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  Cue Adam Savage saying "for science!" But I dunno, it could save some soldiers' lives. It's only outrageous until you think it through.
  - msrenee 4y ago
    >Jim Stauffer signed a form authorizing medical research on his mother’s body. He also checked a box prohibiting military, traffic-safety and other non-medical experiments. That's where it crosses the line between unfortunate and immoral.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]