If you read the whole article, it turns out that Americans are often too tall to donate their bodies to science, too: the limit is 6'. The reason is pretty simple: the anatomy labs have tables that accommodate bodies of a certain size. In the good states, if you donate your body but it can't be used, they'll cremate it at their expense and return the ashes. A lot of hedging and hemming aside, I think I've pretty much captured the whole article.
The second figure cannot be right. I'm just a hair under 6' and I see women taller than me way more often than that would suggest. I'd maybe believe 0.3%, but 0.03% can't possibly be correct. 3 in 10,000? Got to be higher.
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. :)
Are tall women evenly distributed? I don't really know, but I wonder if having a hard time finding a partner in small towns would in some way push them towards cities, or something like that. Maybe there's something about the place you live, or the people you tend to be around.
You might be forgetting about the existence of your forehead. Your eyes will look up to a person who is the same size as you.
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.
His explanation makes sense to me, and I don't think it was an argument to begin with. 15%, 7% - that sounds like a problem one would encounter "often" to me. It sounds like you're actually both in agreement.
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!
>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.
That is a dismissal and the fact that you have failed to clarify any point whatsoever and are keeping your statements vague and ambiguous suggests you're either trolling or are genuinely ignorant.
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.
It's grown a bit tiresome when a company or organization needs to do something for a straightforward physical reason and then people try to blame them for "fat shaming".
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.
Society decides what is acceptable by making it acceptable. Universities used to not have wheelchair ramps; a similar provocative title in those days may have been "Americans can't walk well enough to learn". The reason people couldn't access those buildings was a straightforward _physical_ reason yet it was still a deliberate choice to make those buildings accessible to people who could walk and inaccessible to those who could not.
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.
I'm good friends with a guy who works at Walmart, he's an assistant store manager, and has worked there since we were in high school.
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.
That is partially true, but it misses 2 important factors:
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.
> 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.
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.
They don't turn them away because "they don't know how to operate on them" they turn them away because many surgical procedures on obese patients are well studied to have negative outcomes and risks for obese patients that do not justify the procedure. There is no polite way to say "you are too obese to undergo this procedure" using a modern framework of body acceptance, and that is a problem with the body acceptance framework, not the limitations of modern medicine.
> There is no polite way to say "you are too obese to undergo this procedure"
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.
They turn away those patients from some operations because it’s more dangerous dm for the patients in operation and recovery. If the danger outweighs the potential benefit, why do the surgery?
It's in part more dangerous in operation because the surgeons have not trained to operate on bodies in that condition. In part, because they refuse to operate on bodies in that condition, living or dead.
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)
It’s more dangerous because it takes more time, nurses have to manually hold back hunks of flesh, visceral fat blocks the view of key veins/nerves/arteries, more anesthesia is required, and really everything else. Moreover recovery from surgery is worse and more complicated.
Wouldn't this in turn enable what is, by and large, an avoidable state of self that adds considerable strain on an already overly-taxed medical system?
Placing the burden of reducing strain on a medical system as bad as the USA's is ridiculous. There are reasons to want to avoid obesity but how is one of them to accommodate the medical system? The reasoning is completely backwards. It's like saying that the legal system should not get better at finding who is at fault because it will reduce people's self-reliance at resolving conflicts.
Suppose I break my collar bone riding my bike down a mountain. That's a totally avoidable state of self; people really shouldn't be doing 60mph without adequate protective equipment. Should I be turned away at the hospital?
I generally don't read Vice, but I saw some of their videos from the Ukrainian war and they were genuinely good. If you want to give them a chance, I would recommend this one:
their videos on ukraine are heavily emotional with a soundtrack to queue your emotions without giving a good understanding of whats going on with the war, just emotional coverage of how hard life is.
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.
There are people who are more interested in the human tragedy aspects of war, not the "daily tactical breakdowns".
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.
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.
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.
I think persons stop being persons the moment they die in most countries.
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.
The "practical reasons" are kind of dumb. At some point a medical professional is going to encounter obese patients, and the abject refusal to prepare for that possibility greatly hinders the practicality of the training.
Except those reasons are also stupid, more than half of Americans are overweight, and you're telling me medical students don't practice on patients over 200lbs???
The journalist is not precise at all when stating:
> 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
The part that confuses me about the family struggling to figure out what to do with the remains is that the family would still get the remains back even if the donation were accepted. Donating a body doesn't mean that it gets thrown away - they take what remains of the remains, cremate it, and give it back to the family.
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.
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?
> 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.
>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.
You might not be aware, but lots of people who donate their bodies for science don't have their bodies end up as cadavers for dissection or even traditional medical research.
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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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.
There are very significant regional differences in obesity, for which “access to cheap, good tasting food” is not in itself a sufficient causal explanation.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
> Mexico is the most obese nation in the world, surpassing the United States in both Adult and Child obesity.
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.
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.3
I don't understand the argument proposed here. Americans should ignore what is an enormous (no pun intended) health crisis because other countries are slightly worse? It doesn't matter what Mexico is doing or not doing, the current figures for obesity are staggering
I think this is less a whataboutism of "But Mexico is worse!", and more general eye rolling at another breathless, unquantified hate-on-America article.
The 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.
> I think this is less a whataboutism of "But Mexico is worse!", and more general eye rolling at another breathless, unquantified hate-on-America article.
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.
It's obviously click-bait, yes. But they were pretty restrained, for Vice, on the "America is bad" angle, and they kept to the numbers. I'm tired of the tenor of "Look at the stupid Americans!" in the general run of click-bait articles too, but this was better than I expected.
