On February 11th, the Star Tribune published the following article on the increased likelihood of death faced by obese children. http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/health/84182337.html?page=1&c=y. While this article did an commendable job drawing attention to the problems of childhood obesity, it glossed over the fact that the study was done among only Native Americans, a population which often experiences decreased access to substandard healthcare.
"Dear Editor:
While the article "Obese Kids Face Twice the Risk of an Early Death, Study Finds" was certainly justified in its conclusions about the risks of obesity in childhood, I believe an opportunity was missed to examine the differential experiences of chronic illness in disparate populations. The quoted study was carried out, according to the author, only among Pima and Tohono O'odham Native Americans. We can presume that access to these populations was gained by their concentrations on reservations and their limitation to the government provided health care services available. I do not want to suggest that childhood obesity is not a dangerous condition, no matter what the social or economic conditions of the sufferer. Rather, I would like to point out that for the most part, treatments of cardiovascular disease, cancer, and other illnesses linked to obesity, are well-established, and with some exceptions, are very efficacious. We must remember that, in this population, deaths before 55 are correlated not only with childhood obesity, but with poverty, limited access to care (which is often substandard), discrimination, and a variety of other social determinants of health. It would not be surprising to find that obese, well-insured adults, who had been obese, well-insured children, while more likely to die before 55 than their well-insured, healthy weighted cohorts, would be much less likely to die before 55 than the Native American individuals who participated in this study. We must acknowledge that physiological damage from childhood obesity must also go untreated to significantly increase likelihood of death."
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I agree with a majority of your comments and logic, however i think that grammatically it would be to your advantage to do away with a few of the clauses and run on sentences. For me as a reader it took away from the true intent of the letter because i was getting a bit lost amidst all the commas.
ReplyDeleteAlso i'm not entirely sure discrimination is a legitimate source of death, unless your are referring to some form of lynching?
Finally, clarification on the "physiological damage" what degree of damage are you referring to? teasing or self esteem etc...
probably true. i definitely need to rework a few of the sentences.
ReplyDeletein terms of discrimination, it has been shown that discrimination leads to poorer health outcomes. there are some really interesting studies involving black and white government employees, who are paid/treated theoretically the same because of just that. however, the black employees have consistently poorer health indicators than do the white employees. there are a few other studies also looking at the physiological effects of the stress of consistent discrimination. i'll try to find some of those. so, answering your third point, those physiological effects of discrimination are often times cardiovascular (higher blood pressure, therefore damange to the heart and vessels), or can be less directly physical, such as not getting a job because of "race" and therefore not benefiting from quality health coverage.