Why it won’t be so easy for medicine to displace BMI
“I think the trend is moving away from BMI, but these entrenched issues don’t fade away easily.”
The policy that the American Medical Association adopted this week to de-emphasize the use of BMI is part of a growing movement away from the single, weight-based metric and toward a broader way of assessing health risk through multiple factors.
Yet it will take more than the giant physician group to displace the use of the body mass index throughout medicine. Reliance on the metric is ubiquitous in the ways health care is delivered and paid for — from surgeries to fertility treatment, from drug approvals to insurance reimbursement.
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