Now that is a weird feeling

[inulro]

The last few days, I've had a rotten stinking head cold. This isn't as bad as it sounds. The only time I feel like a regular person is when I have a cold (the down side being I get to feel like a regular person with a cold, and thus my brain function isn't an awful lot improved). This is the reason I finally had to admit that my primary problem is with my immune system rather than a sleep disorder, despite the fact that my blood work says otherwise. Flu-like viruses knock me out completely - it's only colds that have this effect. I even got to feel like a normal person for two days after a cold had gone once, about 4 years ago. I got all excited that I was better and - erm - I wasn't.

I haven't exactly gone to town with my new found feeling good, unless you count dealing with a lot of stuff I'd been putting off at work and going to the library. Not very rock and roll of me, but I still have to worry about the consequences later.

*****

Last night Radio 4's current events programme, The World Tonight had a piece on the latest reality TV show - filming sleep-deprived people attempting to do stuff. The person who was speaking against it was someone who works with victims of torture - and countries who don't want to admit to using torture use sleep deprivation. She therefore finds it offensive to use it as entertainment. While I think she went a bit far, the producer defending it was entirely lame.

As a lifetime insomniac, I'm not entirely sure where I stand on the issue, but I think it's along the lines of "why would anybody voluntarily do that?" Except, of course, that they get their moment on TV and then get to go back to sleeping normally.

*******

I don't know why I'm still shocked and outraged at stuff like this. Guess I'm not as jaded and cynical as I like to pretend.

Keeping with stuff I found in today's Guardian, this looks like a really successful project until you see the sample size. Come on people, this is medicine, not sociology.

Comments

[rjshook.livejournal.com]

You are right about the lack of shock and outrage to the foreign aid article. I think my reaction was pretty similar to yours. Mind you I am nearly done reading The best democracy money can buy by Greg Palast so that explains a little of my lack of surprise.

One thing that confused me in the weight loss article was that it stated the children on aver lost 10% of their BMI and were 10% less overweight. Overweight is normally defined as BMI between 25 and 30. Say your BMI is 30. Becoming 10% less overweight would reduce your BMI to 29.5 (10% of 30-25) but the more believable loss of 10% of BMI would drop you from 30 to 27 which is a very nice weight loss. Depending on height this is probably 1 stone. Their traffic light scheme is cute but I think the key was "All members of the family were encouraged to eat healthily, be more active and support the overweight child." I recently read Fat Land and found it very interesting.

Something I have been curious about for a while is when BMI starts to become invalid. I think it is a useful measurement for the majority of the population but I have wondered if it is inaccurate for people with lots of muscle mass and for kids since growing up does strange things to bodies.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

BMI in kids is worked out in a different way to adults and is then plotted as a percentile for the child's age. It's the BMI percentile that has meaning, not the raw value.

And that's I all I know about BMI in kids. Although I work with kids who have problems absorbing nutrients and thus putting on weight, we don't actually use BMI in any meaningful way. It gets recorded once a year and that's it.

As to the percentage lost, I'd say someone didn't have a clue how to do their stats - or fiddled the stats in a way that would look meaningful to the general public.