My brain is not cooperating on the blog post I wanted to have up today, so instead I’ll leave you in the capable hands of my favorite Scottish youtuber.
I am far from the first person to address this, even on this network, but I think that this look at the history of “beauty” as a concept is actually pretty important in thinking about a number of important issues in society. It’s easy to feel like the way things are is basically how they’ve always been, but the reality is that we’re a complex and chaotic species. It’s a good case study in how people can twist themselves and the concept of “citing sources” into truly impressive knots to justify how angry it makes them that reality doesn’t conform to how they think it should work. It’s also a good overview of how we got to where we are in this regard.
I tried listening to the video, but, not to put down the vlogger, I found it kind of tedious. Peterson’s claims are nonsense on the face of it, so you know in advance that any “evidence” is either faulty or misapplied, or both. The only reason I listened to it was because I hoped I’d see a survey of how much and how quickly people’s ideas of “beautiful” change over time, but if he did that, it was after I gave up.
I suppose you could try speeding up the video, but this is by no means the only source of this material. Sorry this one didn’t do it for you!
One thing I will add is that the history in question goes back farther than a survey would allow, and incorporates stuff like politics and the development of “scientific” racism.
Allison:
Mmm… that’s something an art gallery provides, no?
(Rubens is famous enough that “Rubenesque” has entered the lexicon)
(Of course, scrawny starved-looking waifs and “heroin chic” are a more modern thing)
There’s no parallel here with “scientific” racism though. Science – real science, the consensus of the vast majority of actual working scientists – is settled on racism: it’s bollocks, we’re all human and “race” isn’t even really a thing. By contrast, medicine – real medicine, the body of knowledge I can look up advice on from my country’s national health service – is settled on fatness: it’s undesirable, to be avoided, incontrovertibly leads to a laundry list of health problems and the more people who are fat the more it stresses the health system’s limited resources. This isn’t a matter of subjective opinion.
And while there is an identifiable current generally accepted “standard” of beauty, the very fact I’ve had to add the words “current generally” is a clue that making sweeping statement like “not beautiful” without immediately adding the words “to me” just makes you look stupid. As it happens, I agree with Jorp on this particular case – she’s not beautiful, to me. The only problem with saying “she’s not beautiful, to me” is it immediately invites the question “who gives a flying fuck what you think?”. I’m perfectly comfortable with that question, to which the answer is “my wife, and pretty much literally nobody else, and why would they?”, whereas Peterson’s identity is and has for while been entirely bound up in the idea that a LOT of people hang on his every word and opinion. His living depends on it. The fact I don’t personally find her attractive is an irrelevance.
The fact HE doesn’t should be the same, but nowadays it’s literally his job to go round stating his subjective opinions like they’re facts, knowing that a large audience of dolts will lap it up. He’s found the people who’ll pay for his retirement. It’s annoying, but I think this might be the last time I ever comment on him or on other people complaining about it. I’m not his audience, and he’ll never make a penny out of me, or occupy any more of my time. Peace out Jorp, you were briefly interesting, then funny, then depressing, then a little pitiful, and finally just annoying. Well done on parlaying what you had into what you’ve got.
Excessive fatness, yes. That’s when it becomes a health hazard.
Voluptuous bodies, not-so-much.
I said “scientific racism” because it’s the term for the thing. Have you never made even the most cursory study of how we the racial stereotypes and myths that we’re dealing with today?
I put “scientific” in scare quotes, because it’s not. But it’s something that was developed by a lot of the same people who developed the scientific method, and that process relates to modern beauty standards.
Edit: I also think it’s important to understand that history, because if we don’t, it opens the way for bigots to use the demonstrable effectiveness of the scientific method to claim their bigotry as science – similar to how ignoring the creationism of these people paves the way for creationists to claim that “[insert historical name here] invented science, and even he knew that blah blah blah”
Besides the obvious that societies throughout history have prized (symmetrical features), often markers of beauty in women are things that are not common in the general population. Everyone starving? Then well-rounded figures are in. Population can eat? Then rail-thin, starving bodies are in. Population toils on the land, under the sun? Fair skin is beautiful. Population toils indoors in factories and office buildings? Then it’s the one with the leisure to lie around in the sun that’s beautiful.
sonofrojblake @6, John Morales @7: I agree excessive fatness is a health problem, however when one’s fatness becomes excessive varies from one person to another. Some people can live many years in bodies that are considered ‘overweight’ while remaining metabolically healthy, whereas others develop insulin resistance, even type 2 diabetes while living in bodies that are considered ‘lean’ or ‘normal weight’ (that is called TOFI – thin outside, fat inside). The latter, just like unhealthy heavier people, can see improvement by losing weight. It looks like people have a personal boundary between the weight their metabolism can deal with and that which it cannot, and so it is for individuals, with input from their medical care team, to figure out what body weight is good for them.
Also, once excessive fatness develops, it is very difficult to reverse in a way that is stable, though medical treatments are becoming more available. However for health benefit maintaining a weight loss of 10% is considered sufficient.
IOW there are plenty of people that our society would judge as ‘too fat’ who are either just fine or doing their best to support their health, and it is not the business of strangers how their bodies look.
@6,7,10
It’s not at all clear to me that the science is in any way conclusive about the health effects of ‘being fat’. Nor is it clear that science even has much of a handle on the causes, possible remedies, or much of anything else about ‘fatness’.
The “Is being fat bad for you” episode of the excellent podcast Maintenance Phase covers all of this better than I can – but it does appear that much of the science on the consequences of overweightness tends to assume that overweight is the cause of any negative health effects a person subsequently suffers, instead considering the possibility that it might be a neutral factor or also an effect of some underlying cause that contributes to ill-health or mortality.
The problem is that this is a politically very difficult issue to study. One researcher conducted a massive meta-analysis of weight and mortality studies and determined that the data was much murkier than publicly accepted – and that ‘overweight’ is actually predictor of diminished mortality in some older age groups. She was, of course, publicly vilified as being ‘pro-fat’, and I’m sure the fact that many of her detractors sell diet plans has no bearing on this.
There is presently a social consensus that “Fat==Unhealthy” and if you publicly question the conclusion, or worse – dispute it, you can expect a lot of highly emotional attacks masquerading as “Well actually” rationalism. The consensus is that we have “An obesity epidemic”, and since socially we also are taught to believe that people only become fat for morally negative reasons (lazy, greedy, too poor/stupid to eat right), any questioning of the underlying assumptions is interpreted as morally suspect.
@Abe Drayton, 8:
And so did I. For exactly the same reason. You appear to have misinterpreted what I said.
@anat, 10:
With you almost all the way, right up to:
Indeed, and in the land of the free and the home of the brave and paradise for people who make a profit providing healthcare, yes, absolutely. And indeed anywhere in the world how their bodies look is their own business and nobody else’s.
However, in a civilised country, i.e. one with socialised medical provision, e.g. the UK, there’s a limited amount of healthcare to go round paid for (partially) out of my considerable tax burden. If my mother can’t get onto the cancer ward because someone three times her size and half her age is taking up the bed because they’ve spent half their time on earth shoveling cake into their face, they’ve made it my business. Similarly smokers and others who do things to themselves that predictably cause them to become a disproportionate burden on a stretched healthcare system.
@snarkhuntr, 11:
Here you go: https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-weight/bmi-calculator/
The UK’s national health service have come to a conclusion, it seems. What do you claim to know that they don’t?
I admit I’m interested in the tendency among self-identified SJW/sceptics loudly to:
– scoff at creationists who poo-poo the strong scientific consensus on the age of the universe and the origins of life;
– scoff at climate-change deniers who poo-poo the strong scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming;
– scoff at homophobes who parrot “it ain’t natural” and ignore the strong scientific consensus that non-hetero sexual behaviour is not only natural but common in humans and so, so many other animals;
– scoff at “scientific” racists who poo-poo the strong scientific consensus on the fiction of “race”
… but look at the strong scientific consensus on the relationship between health and body shape/weight and start reaching for “there’s this one maverick researcher” argument as though that’s not exactly the kind of thing people who know they’re wrong do in all those other fields do. It’s a fascinating blind spot, and I do wonder if people who do it know, when they’re doing it, how much like all those other obviously wrong people they sound.
snarkhuntr, I think anat got me better. Nothing in their comment I’d dispute.
However.
You’ve written “It’s not at all clear to me that the science is in any way conclusive about the health effects of ‘being fat’.”, so I respond that science is pretty damn conclusive about the health effects of ‘being excessively fat’.
(Nothing wrong with being lean, either — being excessively lean however, not good)
—
Annyway, issue at hand is esthetics, not health.
Now, I haven’t seen this video (I far, far prefer text) but I have seen Jordan’s stupid tweet and his feeble rationalisation. It did not include health.
[OT]
sonofrojblake, BMI is a very very flawed proxy measure for fatness.
It’s long bugged me that it remains in use.
If someone wants to know how fat they are, a caliper test is far better (though not the best method).
Anedotally, I personally registered as obese from my 20s until my 40s by that measure, reaching a peak weight of 83Kg at a height of 178cm at age 33. At around 10% body fat by caliper test at the gym.)
Plugging that into your calculator (including that I was very physically active) yields:
26.1Your result suggests you are overweight
...
Your health would really benefit from gradually losing just 5% of your current weight.
Aim to lose 4.2kg
It took me years to gain those 4.2Kg via resistance training, gaining weight whilst becoming leaner. Lost them now, of course, since I’ve become far more sedentary. Probably around 15% body fat these days, around 65Kg.
—
Smokers who pay a shitload of tax on their tobacco products over their smoking career. Smokers who will presumably die many years younger, so that their end-of-life care is of significantly less duration than that healthier people.
(You have to look at the entire picture)
@John Morales – I entirely understand if it’s not worth the bother, but I just wanted to check – do you know how to pull up a transcript on Youtube? The formatting isn’t great, but it’s one way to just read the video’s content.
@sonofrojblake
You’re going to claim some kind of scientific high-ground, and then point to the long-discredited BMI as any kind of measurement of ‘healthy weight’? A scale that measures weight vs. height with no possible way to tell fat content, muscle mass, or even just size of skeletal frame? That’s sure skeptical and rational of you.
BMI, in a very similar way to IQ, was developed for a particular purpose but found broader appeal because it is simple and cheap to deploy. And much like IQ is widely accepted as inaccurate and less-than-useful in scientific contexts. That you hold it up here as some kind of example of pure science is hilarious. Then again, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d do the same with IQ as well.
I’ll link an article shortly, but here’s a quote from it on why the US lowered the ‘scientific’ cutoff for overweight to 25 from 27.8
““I think it was the French who pushed [the lower cutoff],” said Judy Stern, an emeritus professor of nutrition at the University of California, Davis, and a member of the advisory panel that worked on the new guidelines. “The French always push.” She thinks it might have had something to do with different standards of beauty around the world. “In general, in Europe, it’s better to weigh less. When Americans go to Europe and we weigh more, we’re viewed as not as beautiful.” (She voted against the new guidelines.)”
Anyhow, with regard to evidence that overweight does not neccessarily, in and of itself, lead to poor health outcomes te ‘maverick scientist’ I’m referring to was Katherine Flegal, and she’s not exactly an outlier in the field.
Here’s an Atlantic article about it, if you have any genuine curiosity about the topic. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/08/is-fat-bad/536652/
“I admit I’m interested in the tendency among self-identified SJW/sceptics loudly to:”
. . . . “SJW/skeptics”
Ahh, I think we’re getting to the heart of the matter. I understand a lot better now. It’s generally been my practice to immediately disregard as a dishonest crank anyone who uses SJW unironically as a term to describe someone other than themselves. I see little in your output so far to suggest that this wouldn’t be a good policy here too. But for the benefit of anyone else reading:
Health sciences have long been plagued with ideology. You only need to look at the history of the ‘food pyramid’ or the ‘president’s physical fitness test’ to see that science in this area is strongly driven by several economic and ideological biases.Not to mention decades of bad-but-media-appealing pseudo-science (See: Brian Wansink) that confirms people’s previously held beliefs and is thusly widely reported and nodded over by the headline-reading public.
The thing is: I don’t actually have a personal position on this. I’m open to the possibility that overweight contributes to bad health outcomes, underweight as well. I suspect that as with anything to do with human bodies, the number of conflicting variables is likely such that it is impossible to make any broad generalizations that apply to specific cases. People are complicated. But even questioning the dogma draws Ire and Anger from those committed to the just world idea that “Fat=Bad, therefore fat must be preventable and anyone fat is bad for allowing themselves so to become”
[meta]
Appreciate it, Abe. No, I don’t.
I know to put closed captions on and speed it up, but that’s crude.
Or to use something like youtube-dl to get the audio and then do a speech-to-text conversion. But that really is a hassle, and doesn’t work that well.
Don’t know how to pull up transcripts directly. That would be handy.
—
I took it that the video is “a look at the history of modern “western” beauty standards”, which is a concept with which I’m already familiar.
As I noted, just looking at movies from different decades or going to an art museum or flipping through old magazines makes that rather evident.
[meta]
John,
This method works in Firefox, at least: with the video open through youtube.com, on the bar that has the thumbs up/down, share, etc at the very end there’s a “. . . ” elipsis. If I click that, it brings up ‘show transcript’ if the user allows. This will open the transcript in a box to the right of the video. You can enable/disable timestamps.
If you’re already using youtube-dl – you also have the option of using it to download only the closed captioning for a video… have a look through the settings. Youtube’s autoCC function is actually pretty good, could save you a step.
[Thanks, snarkhuntr. Nice to have options.]
/sigh/
@John Morales:
You just looked at the link text, didn’t you? Didn’t read the actual link, and read the bits after the calculator which explain the flaws and exceptions and caveats, including very specifically the one I actually mentioned about it not distinguishing fat from muscle mass? Moving on.
@snarkhuntr:
I didn’t point to BMI. I pointed to the UK National Health Service website, and asked what you claimed to know that they don’t. You clearly didn’t read the actual link either, since you raise the canard of “what about muscle mass?” which has about the same effect as asking “if we’re descended from monkeys how come there are still monkeys?”.
IQ tests are a great way of testing how good people are at passing IQ tests.
Blaming the French is hilarious. Complaining people don’t like you when you come to Europe is beyond hilarious.
I’m a proudly self-identified SJW/skeptic. I wear the moniker happily, and don’t apply it pejoratively to others. But by all means auto-ignore me if it will make you feel better.
This sentence absolutely baffled me. “it is impossible to make any broad generalizations that apply to specific cases” makes no sense. I mean – read it again. It’s entirely self-contradictory. Do you even think about what you’re typing? The ENTIRE POINT of broad generalisations is to avoid being bogged down by specific cases. This is a truly ridiculous objection.
sonofrojblake:
Actually, I did to the extent I looked at it before filling in the boxes.
And used the calculator.
And posted excerpts from the results it provided.
(Pretty neat for just looking at the link text, eh?)
It’s those very and extensive flaws and exceptions and caveats to which you refer that makes it so very flawed. Not something I would advocate, indeed, something about which I might well remark when someone advocates it.
(Obviously)
@sonofrojblake #20
What do you mean by “bogged down by specific cases”? People deal with health at an individual, specific level.
@Abe Drayton, 22: policy for national health care systems isn’t based on specific, individual cases. Specific, individual cases are weather. The science and policy is based on the climate – the aggregate stats over a population. I’m surprised you’re unable to understand the difference.
Healthcare policy has to, at minimum, be designed to allow individualized healthcare. At this point we know that while there are health problems associated with being fat, they’re also associated with things like a sedentary lifestyle or an unhealthy diet. Focusing on the fat doesn’t help with that. It also regularly causes medical professionals to overlook real health problems because they’ve diagnosed the patient with being fat, so they write off all symptoms as stemming from that.
The generalization you’re defending actively harms people. That’s kind of the opposite of good policy. Whether or not you think broad generalizations are necessary, it seems pretty clear that this particular one is bad.
Citation needed.
It “seems pretty clear” that the earth is six thousand years old, to people determined to ignore the evidence and prepared to simply state that what they believe is fact.
Meanwhile, the UK National Insitute for Health and Care Excellence has quality standard QS127, “Obesity: clinical assessment and management”, starts with informing the patient of their BMI. https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/qs127
Can you explain why you consider your opinion more valid than that of this UK national body of medical specialists? (Ideally something that doesn’t make you come across like an anti-vax type, assuming you’re not actually one of those people. And if you’re not anti-vax, your rationale for cherry-picking which widely-accepted medical advice you like and which you ignore and think you know better than would be interesting.)
One other thing:
That’s the opposite of true. Healthcare policy, at its maximum, with infinite resources, might aspire to one day deliver fully individualised healthcare. In the real world, of course, this is self-evidently impossible, because there aren’t an infinite number of doctors and nurses and physiotherapists and speech therapists and whatever else you personally might find you need today or next week or next year.
At minimum, healthcare policy has to identify what is the best distribution of its limited resources to make the best clinical outcome for most people. That absolutely requires making statistically robust generalisations, including preventive healthcare messages and interventions like getting people to engage in behaviours that improve their health, like exercise and eating more fruit and veg and less meat, and getting them to stop doing things like smoking, drinking alcohol beyond a really quite small amount, and being overweight. Generalised health interventions like this offer better value for money than chasing the unreachable chimera of “individualised healthcare”, especially if you’re lucky enough to live somewhere where it’s taxpayers’ money. Thus – if a taxpayer funded, not-for-profit national health service is using a tool or recommending a particular approach, you’re going to have work much, much harder to convince me you know better than them than just saying “BMI bad”.
This was from a very cursory search. There are a lot of stories like this.
I consider my opinion “more valid” because I recognize that large institutions often move slowly on things like this (as they are doing for things like ADHD, for example), and I’m aware of the ways in which the focus on fat has harmed the health and healthcare of fat people. I’d be curious why you think that stuff just doesn’t count for some reason. It’s like you’ve got a commitment to your belief, and you’re dismissing evidence that counters it, or at minimum point-blank refusing to look into it.
It’s different from the anti-vax thing because there are actual cases of demonstrable harm with clear causality, and there are no examples of outright fraud anything close to what we’ve seen with the antivax community, unless you have some “fat activism Andrew Wakefield” I’ve never heard of.
Just to hammer home the “you’re avoiding evidence that disagrees with you” point, here are another couple citations that you could have found if you gave a shit about whether or not you’re right on this. Since, you know, you’ve decided to be a dick about it.
From Discover Magazine.
From Scientific American
Can you explain why you’re so lazy you couldn’t be bothered to check your assumptions?
Can you explain why you decided to rely on a governmental authority influenced by politics, rather than doing 30 seconds of research to check your assumptions?
Wow. Crikey.
You stated it outright, you consider your opinion more valid than the consensus medical opinion. Where did you do your medical degree, btw? And your reasoning is, they “move slowly”. There’s lots of them and only one of you, so obviously you’re more agile and forward thinking. Good grief. You really do sound like a climate-change denier or anti-vaxer, you know?
I’m aware that the plural of anecdote is not data, and that for every fat person allegedly harmed by the healthcare system there’ll be two or three or more who, in response to being told to lose weight, just, y’know, lost weight, and had a better outcome as a result. I can rattle off a list of people I know who got told to put down the cake, did so, lost weight, and had their lives, health and happiness transformed. I’d be curious why you think that stuff doesn’t count for some reason.
HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAhahahaahahahahaaha.
https://fullfact.org/health/expose-false-total-vaccine-deaths/
“The UK does report data on the number of deaths that were due to the Covid vaccines. According to the Office for National Statistics, there were 27 of these deaths in England… It is possible that the UK total may rise, if there’s been a delay in registering some deaths due to the vaccines.”
Yeah, you sound soooo different from the anti-vax people.
One phrase from your wall of text jumped out at me:
This is a very cunning and disingenuous line. EVERYONE who has ever talked to me from a position of qualified authority has been absolutely clear on one thing: if you want to lose weight, exercise is one, tiny element of the lifestyle change you require. Estimates have varied, but the absolute most anyone has ever told me exercise contributes to weight loss is about 25%, and that’s if you’re in the gym for an hour or more, most day.
Weight loss, I’ve been told by literally every professional I’ve ever consulted, is really all about diet… so that bleating line “but they exercised!!!11!!!1!” is covering something up. Ask yourself what, and why.
I know I’m kibitzing on this conversation unrelated to the topic of beauty standards reflecting cultural norms, rather than some fixed ideal.
But still.
sonofrojblake:
I kinda wonder about just how many professionals you’ve consulted.
Starve yourself (eat less than you burn) but remain sedentary, you’ll lose weight and muscle mass.
Eat exactly the same but exercise, you’ll lose weight… and gain muscle mass.
So.
“all about diet” is vaguely true in the sense that one will lose weight if they consume more calories than they expend, but most certainly not true in the sense that everything else is irrelevant.
Point being, exercising is more important than dieting for the majority of people than is dieting. And healthier.
—
Personally, I have no particular preferences, esthetically. I like bodies of all shapes, other than at the extremes of grossly obese or skelletally thin.
Esthetically, I mean.
Since I’ve weighed in already:
Actually, the plural of anecdote is not data, but a collection of anecdotes is indeed data.
That irrelevance aside, I already showed you how your link to that calculator indicated that at my prime, after I had painfully gained weight in the gym, I should lose some weight. Whenceupon you mumbled something about caveats.
Look: I’m pretty sure that the intent behind promoting that routine BMI test is to screen out possible cases who can then get properly tested and diagnosed, not to make a final determination. Because it’s cheap and easy as.
(Also, I note your phrasing: for every alleged case of X, there will be 3, 4 or more cases of ¬X. Those are, apparently, not alleged)
Dude, I linked you to reputable sources, which in turn have their own citations.
And you are apparently committed to ignoring them.
It’s surreal to see someone insisting that bias can’t possibly exist in medical bodies.
There absolutely is bias in the medical community. They absolutely do not see what they do not want to see. A few years back, I was having some symptoms that Dr. Google told me was diabetes. I was (and am) a triathlete and my weight and fitness were both absolutely fine, but my symptoms were classic for diabetes. My doctor refused to test me because “people your size are NEVER diabetic!”
Well, guess what, I was, and I landed in the ER before I got the diagnosis. Long story short; my body does not cope with a vegetarian diet, which is something the doctors recommended to me to avoid family health problems my father was experiencing. The hospital-affiliated nutritionist I had been working with steered me wrong.
Oh, and for the record, yes – it was my bad that I mistook that medical group for a gov’t body. I thought we were still talking about a branch of the NHS.
Are there biased doctors? Sure. Just as I’m sure there are racist doctors and sexist doctors and homophobic doctors. Does this mean the entire medical profession is not to be trusted? Hey, if you like.
Are there fallible doctors who’ll recommend something based on what works for most people, which turns out to be the wrong advice for one specific patient? Duh. They’re doctors, not clairvoyants. If you’re expecting them to get everything perfectly right first time, you’re expecting too much.
Is the *consensus opinion* of the medical community as a whole biased? (Consensus opinions like: cigarettes are bad for you, alcohol above a certain pretty low limit is bad for you, clean your teeth, get your kids vaccinated against measles, and so on…) That’s a harder sell, to me. Like I said: I’m a chemical engineer, not a doctor. I have neither the time nor the inclination to furiously research every bit of medical advice I encounter in case it’s wrong, any more than I’m desperately trying to pick holes in Covid vaccines, evolution, climate change, the big bang or the 2020 USA election result.
But sure, go ahead, disagree (as a non-expert) with the widely-accepted consensus opinion of a body of professionals, based on your personal research… just like the anti-vaxers do, just like the creationists do, just like the climate change deniers do, just like the Trumpies do.
You’ve obviously done a LOT of research about the advice on obesity, if it gives you the confidence to go against mainstream medical advice, and moreover to tell others they should too. Have you done as much work on the covid vaccines? On the measles vaccine? The combined MMR? On fluoride toothpaste? On safe levels of alcohol? On safe levels of nicotine? On safe levels of asbestos? Benzene? Toluene? Microplastics? PHBs? PCBs? PFOA?
I mean – I’d hate to think you fixated on one bit of medical advice you didn’t like and just researched that, but took the medical mainstream at their word on everything else. You didn’t do that, did you?
So given the phenomenal amount of research you must have done, good luck to you. Please don’t ask me to drink your Kool-aid, though. There’s too much sugar in it and I’d hate to get fat.
I’ve done some research because it affects me personally, and it affects the treatment I get. Similar problems do not exist with the other things you mentioned.
But yeah, feel free to fuck right off.
“it affects me personally, and it affects the treatment I get. Similar problems do not exist with the other things you mentioned.”
You didn’t get the covid vaccine? You didn’t vaccinate your kids? You don’t use toothpaste? You don’t ever encounter hazardous chemicals in my context?
Really?
“any”, not “my”. Bloody autocorrect
I’ve looked into flouridation over the years, enough to be satisfied that the conspiracy cranks are full of it. Likewise vaccines, and the COVID vaccines.
When I worked with hazardous chemicals, you’re damned right I made the company show me the medical safety data sheets, even when they tried to say no, and made me do it off the clock.
But none of those affect how doctors interact with me, so I have less direct need to know about them ahead of time.
When I had malaria, I spent my time in the hospital reading everything about the disease the doctors would give me, because it was relevant to my treatment, and I wanted to know.
Again – you seem committed to ignoring both the differences between what we’re talking about, and the comparisons you’re making, and you seem committed to ignoring the history of bias in medicine. Maybe you’re just ignorant about the latter? Still being an asshole either way.
It’s wild to me that we’re talking about a specific health circumstances that doesn’t apply to everyone, and so the people in question are often underserved, and you?
You respond with examples that are universal, and that affect everyone the same.
Do you also give disabled people shit for learning more about their disability than pollution?
Admission: I’m probably wrong. Still watching the data, but here’s a pint I found today.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jun/29/knee-replacements-stall-in-regions-of-england-with-weight-rules-for-patients
Point, not pint ffs
Well, kudos for coming bad to admit that, I suppose, and thanks for the article.
Forming a workout habit is hard enough with how my brain works. I think it would be completely impossible if I had joints that were bad enough that they actually needed replacing, at least without paying for a personal trainer.