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medpundit |
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Monday, April 05, 2004Across the Netherlands hotel owners are lengthening beds and raising door mantles to stop the nation's tall youth suffering from irreparable anatomical damage. According to a New Yorker essay on the subject last week, Dutch ambulances are even having to keep their back doors open on many occasions to allow for the prodigious dimensions of their patients' legs. Better check those children for steroids. It's difficult to take this article seriously, though. Especially in light of this explanation for why "during the Little Ice Age, in which temperatures plummeted across the world between 1300 and the mid-19th century, there was a noticeable decrease in human stature": Firstly, all mammals get shorter and rounder when climates cool. It is a physiological response to cold. Short, round bodies preserve heat better than tall cool ones. I can only think of one part of the body that shrinks as a physiological response to cold, and only about half of us are endowed with it. UPDATE: A reader notes: This article is so obviously biased in its anti-Americanism, it's laughable. On its face it doesn't make sense because we are the fattest group of people on earth, and slinging around the term, "poor nutrition" without citing any evidence for that, such as a dietary analysis, is pure conjecture. Something tells me there are a fair amount of vitamins and proteins sneaking in with all those calories. Furthermore, they also tossed out the racial mix as a possible explanation without adequately analyzing it, either. They did not look at the current racial mix of Denmark, the UK and the US- they only pointed out that in the past, the US had lots of immigrants, too, and came out ahead of Europe. However, I would be willing to bet that the height measurements done in the nineteenth century may have completely ignored entire groups of immigrants, race relations and health care being what they were in those days. Simply put, until they know the racial makeup of the people who were actually measured, this study is worthless. On the other hand, if you compared the height of North Dakotans against the Danes, you'd have much more closely matched groups. P.S. As an interesting aside, in another article the Guardian noted that it's taking up to 18 months to get an MRI in the UK. There's that good ol' socialized medicine at work again! UPDATE II: Iain Murray takes a serious look at the study's faults. posted by Sydney on 4/05/2004 09:06:00 PM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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