Americans Are Too Fat to Donate Their Bodies to Science (2017)
vice.com
vice.com
Also, many women wear heels making them seem taller.
If you’re seeing a lot of women over six feet, you’re either around a lot of Dutch women or they’re wearing elevating shoes (heels, tall flats/clogs.) Or perhaps you slouch. :)
How often do you see women not wearing any shoes? Unless you have a beach lifestyle it can't be that often?
I am 6’7” and I rarely see people my height, but when I do I have aa strange feeling because I am typically the tallest person in a room. When we are the same height, they feel taller to me because I am not familiar with looking up to the top of someone’s head.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_human_height_by_countr...
The average American man older than 20 years of age is 5'9 and if you dig deeper into the source at:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_03/sr03-046-508.pdf
Less than 15% of men (aged 20 and older) are 6' or taller.
Once you factor in women, only about 7% of the population is 6' or taller.
The weight issue has gotten bigger because, well, people have gotten bigger while the infrastructure for storing bodies remains the same. This all seems relatively straightforward and unsurprising. We have the same type of problem with other old infrastructure built to hold human bodies -- like airplane seats.
Today I learned that I'm apparently too tall to donate my body to science. Now that's surprising!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States#/...
Singling out a statistically spurious reason to dismiss a major factor is weak.
>A lot of hedging and hemming aside, I think I've pretty much captured the whole article.
The article is not hedging or hemming anything, it's making it very clear that the main reason why bodies are being rejected is due to obesity as opposed to people being too tall. Furthermore, the article is arguing that this is a problem that is only going to get worse since people are getting more and more obese, but not more and more tall.
You're arguing against stances that no one here has taken.
My original comment was to add precision to what was an otherwise fairly open-ended claim; to turn the "often too tall" into a precise figure of 7%. The article is not about that 7%, which is a figure that has likely remained fairly consistent for decades. Instead, the bulk of the article is about the 40% of Americans who are too obese. You have decided to dwell on a detail that 7% is actually significant (ignoring the fact that there's a lot of overlap between the 7% of Americans who are over 6' and those who are obese) and in doing so have turned this into a petty semantic argument.
What exactly do you think it means to claim that an article is hedging and hemming? If you're actually arguing in good faith instead of trolling, you should be able to provide a clear answer to that, but something tells me you won't and will instead continue to repeat the same semantic drivel over and over again.
The article is pretty clear further down on the reasons for these limitations:
> 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. Dissection is also made more difficult when a cadaver carries more fat—the dissector has to cut through the layers of fatty tissue to reach the body's organs.
But then the article also tries to hype up that not taking her donation is some kind of injustice:
> But Scott McPherson knows first hand there's something unpleasant about denying a person's dying wishes, too. "My mom just wanted to donate her body for something she believed in," he says. Instead, the McPhersons founds themselves trying to figure out an after-death plan for their mother that went against everything she'd asked them to do.
The whole irony in this is the journalist deliberately used (while true) an extremely insensitive title to get you to click, "Americans Are Too Fat to Donate Their Bodies to Science", but then tries to highlight how insensitive it is that schools won't/can't take obese full-body donations.
The only reason I can see why would not be judged to be a case of that is that the actual discrimination happens after death, but I don’t think that will hold.
However, I expect that the moment it becomes common knowledge or they tell you upfront about it, courts would rule living people who consider donating their body to science would be discriminated against.
Given that, I would think keeping it 100% a secret wouldn’t work, either, as keeping crimes/misdemeanors secret never makes them legal.
Doing the spiderman-points-the-finger at editor or whatever - who cares. Just stop reading vice.
If you want good coverage of the war in ukraine you need to follow someone like 'Reporting from Ukraine' or 'denys davydov' on youtube. Rather than crying babushkas tugging on heartstrings to a soundtrack meant to manipulate you, you get actual breakdowns, daily, of the tactical situation in various parts of ukraine and what both sides are trying. You'll get a video roughly every day instead of these heavily edited reports, but you'll know 1000% more about the war in ukraine than watching vice.
If you want to watch actual combat footage you can go to reddit for places like /r/combatfootage or /r/ukrainewarvideoreport. But you will see people die or be mortally wounded, regularly.
If you want to spend 20 minutes feeling emotional vice is your go to. If you want to know about the war in ukraine go somewhere else. Vice is garbage.
Yet another, completely different angle, is the channel of Volodymyr Zolkin, who interviews Russian POWs.
I don't think you can learn anything of value from this. his channel is a PR channel where POWs will say whatever for good treatment. I think its pretty slimy and not a good representation of what russian soldiers actually think.
It's not really about validity or not. Vice doesn't make anything to inform you, it makes things to manipulate you, and they don't hide it. they're pretty slick at videography but you don't leave better informed, just manipulated. get your news somewhere else.
As someone who watches and listens to a lot of history and war content, it's quite easy to forget that behind each number there is a human being. That's why i like the War Against Humanity (companion series of the World War 2 YouTube channel)'s occasional focus into a personal story. After weeks of X deported and sent to the gas chambers, you get accustomed to it. A personal diary/recollection hits different.
Making this particular accommodation has consequences: surgeons turn fat patients away because they don't know how to operate on them. Surgeons can be quite rude in the delivery of that decision, to the point of fat-shaming. While the policy itself might have short-term bona fide reasons, tables can be made bigger and students could be gaining experience with gantries used to move large patients. The medical industry is making perfect the enemy of good in refusing to care for fat patients, and refusing fat cadavers is just one aspect of that.
This is self-fulfilling. Of course people who are large enough that surgeons chose not to operate on them have worse health outcomes. They will also get fewer interventions that are less invasive, because practitioners won't want to take the risk that the intervention goes bad and the patient needs surgery, because surgeons won't operate.
Of course people who are large enough that every interaction with the medical system involves an irrelevant discussion of weight and diabetes despite a lack of diabetes symptoms will avoid interacting with the medical system, because it's tedious. (sometimes a discussion of weight is relevant, but often times it really isn't)
There is, actually, and it involves compassion. And then there's what actually happens: I've been in the other room and heard a friend get literally yelled at by a doctor for their body weight, and heard many similar stories second hand. The verbal abuse that patients endure is inexcusable, and highly counterproductive.
When a medical school purchases tables, a decision must be made as to what kinds of corpses it will accommodate, and the decision has been made that 200lb, 6' is the limit. That choice could have been different.
For the record, I don't think this instance is fat-shaming, for the reason that the bodies were donated with the goal of advancing science in some nebulous way, not specifically to be dissected at a medical school. So the cost of buying an expanded table may prevent the school from buying a different, more useful piece of equipment, and it's probably not directly going against the person's wishes.
About 10 years back he was telling me about the scooters they have in the store, and how they had started receiving a heavier-duty model. I forgot the exact weight capacity-but it was somewhere around 500lbs.
Then it dawned on me that somewhere along the line, people had to complain about the scooters not being big enough, or enough scooters were damaged by large individuals. Enough people eventually complained that Walmart had a meeting at their corporate offices to decide "how big" of customers they were going to accommodate with the newer, heavier-duty scooters.
There were probably polls and studies, weighing people out in the field, etc. Not to mention the work the company that provides the scooters had to do.
1. Accommodating larger people usually is just fundamentally more expensive. Space costs money. I mean, airplane seats are famously narrow, and while yes, it's a deliberate chose, if airplane seats were considerably wider it would make airlines unprofitable. I'm not saying that's a big reason here (designing a bigger table isn't that much in the grand scheme of things), but it's not just deciding between two equally valid choices.
2. A bigger reason in this case, though, which is pointed out in the article, is that most of these bodies are used for dissection and training. Dissecting an obese body, if doing it for the purpose of anatomical study, is much, much more difficult.
"Man learns mom's body donated for research was instead blown up in military testing"
https://cbsaustin.com/news/nation-world/man-learns-moms-body...
This might actually be a better article. Shows some examples of how the bodies are set up to be blown up:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-body...
Wonder how many people would sign their bodies up for military testing if they made the distinction.
Do they ask people already in the military if they want to donate their bodies for military testing?
Should be noted here as well.
> a nation where two thirds of the population is now considered overweight or obese
Their own link give a total of 73.1% for overweight among adults US peoples in 2018. The latest data of the CDC has 73.6%. In any case, it's almost three quarters, not two thirds. And that's before the covid crisis, which probably worsened the situation. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/obesity-overweight.htm
So there should be no struggle to find a plan here - do what the person asked for - cremate them. From the family perspective, that is exactly what would have occurred anyway, just with different timing.
...
> 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?
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.
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.
“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-...
"Dismembered limbs sewn together like 'Frankenstein' at body-parts donation center, FBI found"
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-body...
That's where it crosses the line between unfortunate and immoral.
Donation for science is a broad category which includes everything from crash tests to bombs.
Source: I have a friend who runs crash tests,*, but I'll give you a link I Googled anyway.
https://www.bodyshopbusiness.com/strange-but-true-donated-bo...
*Fun but morbid fact: they have a lot of trouble procuring dead babies.
Oh well.. that's good... kinda.
FYI - Mexico is the most obese nation in the world, surpassing the United States in both Adult and Child obesity.
Nearly 1 in 3 adults (30.7%) are overweight.2
More than 2 in 5 adults (42.4%) have obesity.2
About 1 in 11 adults (9.2%) have severe obesity.2
About 1 in 6 children and adolescents ages 2 to 19 (16.1%) are overweight.3
Almost 1 in 5 children and adolescents ages 2 to 19 (19.3%) have obesity.3
About 1 in 16 children and adolescents ages 2 to 19 (6.1%) have severe obesity.3The article even admits it doesn't know if this is actually a problem or not. FTA:
> There are no statistics that cover bodies donated or bodies offered to programs, no official way to tell how many Americans who fall into the overweight or obese categories have been turned away like McPherson.
It's an article by an american outlet on an american issue.
Hell, it's a five years old article by an american outlet on an american issue.
> The article even admits it doesn't know if this is actually a problem or not. FTA:
The article literally tells you it's a problem that occurs in the first paragraph. What you're quoting says it doesn't know the full breadth of the problem, because there's no data collection on the subject.
"There is no data" != "there is no problem".
> It's an article by an american outlet on an american issue.
The article never proves it's an issue.
That certainly does not mean that we don't have an obesity problem here. As a publication with a primarily US audience, you would expect Vice to focus primarily on America.