Stop the Insanity!

Remember the lady 10-20 years ago who created a diet fad around the idea that diets don't work and she would always yell out "stop the insanity!" to the point of driving you insane? If I remember right, Susan Powter was her name. Well, I want to start yelling that at the health care industry for some of their useless studies because it seems like every week I see another study that comes out that makes you say in a very mature manner "well, duhhhh.....I could have told you that myself and saved you a couple million dollars".
Last week I heard of a study that related the increased risk of stroke in women to the fact that they visit the salon more and tilt back their head a lot thus increasing the pressure to their carotid arteries which induces damaged plaque to break off and travel into the brain which creates a stroke. Thats a little bit like performing a study on drivers that found that unsafe drivers were the ones who had peanut butter for breakfast because their tongue was stuck to the roof of their mouth and they were searching for gum so they ran into a telephone pole. To sum it up: Subjective, Stupid and pure conjecture. In no way can that be proven and even if it were then what do you propose as the solution? Having women wear neck braces at the salon so as to protect their carotid arteries. Wouldn't that create even more deaths from choking? It seems we have a dilemma.
In my particlar specialty there was once a study done that measured toenail growth (I kid you not) in the summer as compared to the winter to determine the specific time of year when toenails grow the fastest. I would like to see the conversation that led to that study......Ok maybe I wouldn't. I can't even imagine how bored you would have to be at work one day to decide "wow, I really have no idea whether toenails grow faster in July or December and I have no idea how I have run my practice to this point without that information!". So you launch the life saving study for which society will forever be indebted to you.
This week's choice of stupid study though is not quite so obvious but dumb nevertheless. A study published in the journal Neurology found a link between belly fat in your 40's and dementia in your 80s. Dementia for those of you who may have "forgotten" is the condition where you lose short term memory and eventually fade into more permanent memory loss which is a very frightening idea for all of us. Well this does seem like a reasonable study though because we all want to know how to avoid dementia so that we don't forget how (to avoid it that is). The problem is applicability (ie-what do we do about it?) and the definition of belly fat. See, as a bit of perspective our current view of fat is that it only takes second place to terrorism in public safety and pure evil....Ok fine I am sure cigarettes are in there somewhere near the top as well. So this study decided that people who store fat in their abdomen (and for the record everyone does even if they are skinny) had a higher risk of developing dementia. In other words, we all have a higher risk of developing dementia while we are alive. I guess we could have saved a lot of money on that one and just come out and said "as long as you are alive and not dying of starvation you are at risk of dementia and dying". That would have summed it up just fine but then it wouldn't accomplish the agenda some people seem to have of saving us from ourselves. I don't know about you but I can't wait for the study that comes our to determine whether we are more at risk for death the longer we live. Now that would be some useful information.