"Body Mass Index"—Pretentious Nonsense?
In my previous post, I compared the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and the Body Mass Index (BMI). Therein, I was tempted to include my deep dissatisfaction with the usage of mass in Body Mass Index, although I did remark that index was a good word to “instill confusion.” For the sake of the article’s focus and brevity, I stifled myself.
An index is merely a number or scale used to indicate a fact leading to a useful conclusion. As I belabored before, it is a quantitative expression that provides no qualitative evaluation when singularly considered.
Also, I mentioned that I had not heard anyone state the BMI as a measure of fatness, although the following article (please read, at least for the historical background) shows that its Belgium inventor, Adolph Quetelet, did intend this application and that Ansel Keys advanced it for this purpose, thus changing its name from the Quetelet Index to the Body Mass Index.
The Racist History of the Body-Mass Index
My beef and focus within this post is the usage of mass. Why not call the Body Mass Index, the Body Weight Index? I suppose that mass sounds more highfalutin when weight would do just fine. And we don’t want to use words that a layperson might relate to. We must keep with mystical and arcane words that imbue medicine with science, although Keys himself admitted that the BMI was ONLY about 50% indicative of obesity (flip a coin). Hence, mass and index go hand in hand to obscure the fact that with the BMI, medicine has really nothing important to say when even a child can detect overfatness by the mere observation of a naked body.
[I believe that the most accurate term for this index is height-weight index or HWI. And if HWI is too much of a mouth full, then how about, simply, body index?… BI?]
Perhaps the mass part of the term becomes majorly important with the common usage of the abbreviation when spoken. BMI is easier to rattle off the tongue than BWI. If you verbalize this you will experience what I mean.
And when I’m fetched by a nurse from a doctor’s waiting room I always get weighed before being parked for [another] 30-60 minutes in an examining room (before the doctor enters). Note that during this short journey between the waiting room and the examining room, I am weighed. I am not massed.
Then my height and my weight are put into a computer program to provide an I-N-D-E-X. Big whoop! And this index is magically converted to a Body M-A-S-S Index.
Then I might get lectured by the doctor about my weight, not about my mass (or my overfatness).
And the doctor can use the BMI as a third-party authority that confirms I’m bad with my weight. This is somewhat like how BA (the head coach) points to the computer to justify berating Phillip Elliot (the quarterback) for his attitude in the movie, North Dallas Forty, with “… so that's it, that's it, what it all boils down to.” [As though a computer program can be used to assess someone’s attitude, the BMI is used to assess someone’s fatness.]
And then I’m supposing that the usage of mass is not really proper with the physics people. In street parlance, weight and mass are synonymous, but does this pass Hoyle when the docs are spouting science? Seems pretentious, does it not?
Although I’m well informed and articulate on certain specifics of acceleration and gravity and weightlessness and force and torque, I’m not on terra firma with the proper semantics of weight and mass. I allude to terra firma as I’m supposing that mass would be a crucial expression only if used in the context of being extra-terrestrial and in a different, predominant gravitational field. I’ve studied the difference between mass and weight only enough to suspect some hanky-panky with the language.
How much of this is just more bullshit medicine? I really don’t know. And when I’m confused about such matters that are close to my own expertise, I don’t trust the source.
[There are other reasons to weigh a patient besides bodyfat assessment. Many medications are dosed according to the patient’s size. Some go by “weight” and some by “mass” and some by both/ either.]