Pay attention to this American Medical Association (AMA) has started urging doctors to look beyond screening tools that are nearly 200 years old.
The AMA voted to adopt a new policy earlier this week officially recognized BMI “historic breakdown” and acknowledged that it had been used for “racial exclusion.” Instead, it is now recommending alternative steps for diagnosing obesity in clinical settings.
“For a long time I was in this emperor-no-clothes situation, where I couldn’t understand why a very smart doctor kept believing something that was so patently false,” said psychology professor A. Janet Tomiyama. New York Time.
The new policy also prohibits the use of BMI to diagnose eating disorders, saying it is “problematic” because it “does not capture the full spectrum of abnormal eating disorders.”
The recommendations from the AMA are just suggestions, not strict rules that doctors must follow.
However, the association is influential in the medical community, and new policies suggest that the accepted thinking around the metrics and how obesity is measured is finally changing, and that the movement to move away from BMI as just a measure of individual health risk is gaining speed. .
“The goal is to tailor how BMI is used in medical decisions and move away from generalizations that can lead to stigma and bias,” said Dr. Jamy Ard, professor of epidemiology and prevention at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.
“Social media guru. Total beer fanatic. Tv ninja. Typical coffee fan. Amateur entrepreneur. Unapologetic food scholar.”
