, Columnist
Goodbye, Body Mass Index. You Won’t Be Missed.
It’s past time to stop judging patients based on an obesity calculation invented by a 19th-century astronomer.
BMI has never been a great indicator of health.
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The scales are formally shifting on Body Mass Index, a measurement that has been the source of much scorn in recent years. The American Medical Association has now weighed in to say that doctors should look at factors beyond BMI to determine whether a patient is unhealthily obese.
Finally, medical science is looking beyond this nearly 200-year-old formula. It was devised not by a doctor, but by an astronomer. He used it to define what was “normal” — a normal based on White, 19th-century European men.