For your educational enjoyment:
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Apparently these researchers have never attended a typical school:
Obese grade-school children are more likely to be the targets of bullying than their leaner peers are, a UK study suggests.
Researchers found that among more than 8,000 7-year-olds, obese boys and girls were about 50 percent more likely to be bullied over the next year than their normal-weight classmates.
On the other hand, obese boys were also more inclined to describe themselves as bullies.
The article goes on to describe behavior that is pretty obvious to anyone who has attended a grade school. Of course, they have an astute recommendation:
So besides the long-term physical health consequences of obesity, the researchers conclude, many overweight children may also face the psychological and social effects of bullying.
“This study suggests that parents, school personnel, and health professionals need to reduce the occurrence of this behavior and the social marginalisation of obese children at an early age,” they write.
But, there is nothing in the Reuter’s article that indicates that the researchers made any recommendation as to how to achieve this reduction. So I will: simply stop sending children to these institutions.
Make your love connection at Grand Rounds (Vol. 2, No. 21).
If you are on Medicare and need certain procedures performed you might be better off to choose a highly ranked hospital (Free Reg):
A health-care rating company here said today that patients treated at hospitals that receive its top ranking have a 27% lower risk of dying during their hospital stay.
Moreover, according to HealthGrades, which compiles quality report cards on hospitals and doctors and sells those reports to consumers, patients treated at its top-ranked hospitals also have a 14% lower risk of complications.
HealthGrades used the Medicare discharge records from 2002, 2003 and 2004 to rank hospitals based on overall performance of risk-adjusted outcomes associated with 26 common Medicare inpatient procedures and diagnoses.
But why does the MedPage Today Action Point (included with each MedPage article) say this?
Explain to patients who ask that HealthGrades is a private company. Its rankings system is not sanctioned by federal or state government.
Does this mean that we should find the ranking system more trustworthy? That is certainly the way I interpret this. The staff writer and reviewer could have done a bit better.
Most of HealthGrades’ rankings are based on Medicare patients so it is not clear that the results can be extended to younger patients though I’d certainly use this information to help with such decisions.
BTW, where is the google of health care? We need rating and evaluation systems that lets us, the consumers, evaluate hospital and individual physicians based on fees, performance and customer ratings.
Yea, I know that bush can’t make an intelligent statement on science but there are a lot of folks who probably nodded their heads knowingly when he spoke about bannng human cloning and more during last nights stump speach. For all of those and any of the rest of you who haven’t found your way via /. PZ has a bit of science education:
These mice are a tool to help us understand a debilitating human problem.
George W. Bush would like to make them illegal.
He’s trusting that everyone will think he is banning monstrous crimes against nature, but what he’s really doing is targeting the weak and the ill, blocking useful avenues of research that are specifically designed to help us understand human afflictions. His message isn’t “We aren’t going to let the mad scientists make monsters!”, it’s “We aren’t going to let the doctors help those ‘retards.'”
Once again, the ignorance and the bigotry of the religious right wins out over reason and humanitarianism. I think I know who the real pig-men are.
Read it all!