Friday, January 31, 2014

Scientific breakthrough: Almost all doctors are healthy!

This is marvelous--an Alice-in-Wonderland-like optical reflection of the "my patients are sicker" standard line from doctors.  Medscape has published a "Physician Lifestyle Report," in which doctors self-report aspects of their lives. The report presents data from more than 30,000 US physicians.

I know you will be happy to learn that the vast majority of doctors rate their own health as good to excellent.

But there seems to be some denial involved among up to half of the same doctors, as we can see from this chart, in which they report on one commonly used metric of good to excellent health, whether they are overweight.


This all seems to present a weak case for mindfulness about themselves, no?

Speaking of the rest of us, here's how people in the US view their health status.  (Source: 2010 Census.)  Overall, 90% of us, too, think our health is good to excellent, although the percentage varies by income.


But, like the doctors, we are delusional on the overweight issue.  Here are the CDC numbers for the same year as the Census, 2010.

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