The US adult obesity rate is 42.4% [1]. To get to 75% of deaths being obese people, you'd need about a 4x death rate of obese people compared to non-obese people. Most obese people find it extremely hard to stop being obese and often fail despite immense effort. Meanwhile, getting a COVID vaccine reduces the chance of death by >10x at a cost of [1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db360.htm
> Most obese people find it extremely hard to stop being obese and often fail despite immense effort.
this is such a strange comment for me, and I beg people not to reflexively downvote and instead join in for a discussion, but I'm part / have been part of communities where people ROUTINELY achieve remission from disease the medical establishment deems incurable I can go in further details if people ask, but lifestyle intervention has DRAMATIC results for many people, myself included, and results not provided by drug…
> and this is someone working in the medical field Well, yes, even a crackpot can claim to be working in the field. This in no way supports your claim of “routine” cures through diet. There is no evidence that a fucking keto diet will cure cancer* and it doesn’t pass any sniff test as at the end of the day your body still runs on glucose. This is pretty much an insult to anyone not fortunate enough for their cancer t…
Third point, and I'm going to end it here: I myself suffered from Multiple Sclerosis when I was younger; it was retrospectively very easy to correlate, at least in a large part, with diet and lifestyle. The changes I had to make to be in remission were DRAMATIC but worth it. I don't think I would've been insulted to read about people in similar situations experiencing remission from lifestyle adjustments, in fact, I would have been extatic to find out I'm not condemned to slowly drift into being eventually wheelchair-bound, as my doctors were predicting.
The US adult obesity rate is 42.4% [1]. To get to 75% of deaths being obese people, you'd need about a 4x death rate of obese people compared to non-obese people. Most obese people find it extremely hard to stop being obese and often fail despite immense effort. Meanwhile, getting a COVID vaccine reduces the chance of death by >10x at a cost of [1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db360.htm
> Most obese people find it extremely hard to stop being obese and often fail despite immense effort. I used to help out at a slimming group. Like many self-improvement quests, the effort waxes and wanes. Much as I wished for people to achieve their dream of being slimmer, and even though their wishes and often their attempts were laudable, I wouldn't call them "immense". They're people, most wanted an easy fix and s…
This. It's not hard to make the necessary changes if sufficiently motivated. In fact, formulating the motivation is kind of the only step, everybody, and I mean *EVERYBODY* can achieve appropriate weight and even above-average fitness if following the right precepts.
This is why we need medical payments to be capitated, not fee for service. The way medical care currently works has horrible incentives. Medical providers have an incredible informational advantage so patients just do whatever their doctor tells them. Since doctors get paid for doing things they routinely tell people to do things that are proven to have little efficacy. Medical providers should instead be paid per patient they cover. Especially now that hospitals are so consolidated it's relatively easy to tell if health outcomes are better or worse than average over the group of patients they cover. By punishing providers for achieving bad outcomes and sharing the savings they obtain by cutting waste we can drastically reduce healthcare costs.
Medicare and Kaiser permanente are leading the charge with this style of insurance and have already shown it to be cost effective while not reducing the quality of outcomes.
This is why we need medical payments to be capitated, not fee for service. The way medical care currently works has horrible incentives. Medical providers have an incredible informational advantage so patients just do whatever their doctor tells them. Since doctors get paid for doing things they routinely tell people to do things that are proven to have little efficacy. Medical providers should instead be paid per pa…
This is tricky to implement as it introduces other perverse incentives: namely that health care providers stop treating very sick people. You see this in some cases with surgeons already that have a very high success rate. They'll only opt for surgery if it's a relatively minor need, but if it's complicated or there are potentially complicating issues they'll pass.
A lot of $ is spent on medicine because medicine works. Alternatives such as diet, exercise either are spotty in efficacy or do not work. Medicine offers a quick fix and in some cases the only fix. Someone who has cancer will need to be treated with medicine, not diet.
The efficacy of cancer prevention via fitness, diet and lifestyle far exceed the efficacy of cancer treatment by medicine.
This is why we need medical payments to be capitated, not fee for service. The way medical care currently works has horrible incentives. Medical providers have an incredible informational advantage so patients just do whatever their doctor tells them. Since doctors get paid for doing things they routinely tell people to do things that are proven to have little efficacy. Medical providers should instead be paid per pa…
This is tricky to implement as it introduces other perverse incentives: namely that health care providers stop treating very sick people. You see this in some cases with surgeons already that have a very high success rate. They'll only opt for surgery if it's a relatively minor need, but if it's complicated or there are potentially complicating issues they'll pass.
Outcomes for very sick people being worse is taken into account so providers aren't punished if their success rate is lower for those patients. We have all the data we need to know what the outcomes should be for a provider over the course of a year. Anyway, providers have to precommit to their pool of patients, so it's not like they can just pick the lucky ones.
Capitation is admittedly a much more complicated way to administer health care, but fixing the incentives is absolutely worth the pain we may face in the short term. Which we might not considering how well these programs have been shown to work.
But vaccines ARE the miraculouse cure, at least in my country the high case load is because of unvaccinated or not fully vaccinated people. If about 80% of the population took it, we wouldn't have any problem. Of course previous health issues matter when you get sick and of course we should encourage healthier living, but we won't change this in the next 6 Months, for that we have a vaccine.
Vaccines won't help _at all_ if your immune system is completely compromised by other health issues.
Fit, healthy, people are dying left and right. There are risk factors, but don't start thinking you're invicible for not having them. The adaptive immune system is slow, vaccines prime it to react faster with more specific antibodies. Dying of pneumonia does not feel good. It makes grown men cry and beg. Strongly recommend against.
But those "fit, healthy" (the genuinely so, I'm not sure I even agree with the characterization for many of the mediatized cases), are OUTLIERS. Yes, you are never invincible, but it's 100% correct to characterize Covid as a disease of the metabolically dysfunctional. Sadly, this is a HUGE percentage of the population of the world nowadays, which seems to be the point of the article (disclaimer: in true HN tradition,…
> this is a HUGE percentage of the population of the world nowadays,
And thus make up a sizeable amount of COVID patients. I see nothing noteworthy here. Having a preexisting condition makes you suffer more when you contract an infectious disease. I'd expect the same things you said could be repeated for influenza, pneumonia, or anything else. For that matter, how much worse do obese patients fare when recovering from a broken leg? Are fractures then a disease of the metabolically dysfunctional, as you put it?
The US adult obesity rate is 42.4% [1]. To get to 75% of deaths being obese people, you'd need about a 4x death rate of obese people compared to non-obese people. Most obese people find it extremely hard to stop being obese and often fail despite immense effort. Meanwhile, getting a COVID vaccine reduces the chance of death by >10x at a cost of [1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db360.htm
> Most obese people find it extremely hard to stop being obese and often fail despite immense effort. Calories in vs calories out. Simple as that.
You’re fighting a billion years of evolution screaming at you to bulk up in case there’s a famine. Good luck.