Thanks so much for sharing your expertise with me — I was certain that this topic was going to be much more complicated than the news articles I’ve come across were making it out to be.
This is really EXCITING research, and I hope something comes of it, soon, to eradicate the obesity epidemic and plague of type 2 diabetes.
I’m going to print out your posting, so that when I attempt to research this on my own, that I won’t be “hoodwinked” by excrutiatingly dumbed-down articles — something I seem to be encountering more & more on the Internet.... a simplified idea, while not altogether inaccurate, is simply not entirely correct — then gets repeated ad infinitum until it looks like The Truth to a layperson like myself.
It’s quite disconcerting to spend hours researching stuff above my head, and then weeks later, when my understanding is better, to realize that I’d been ‘hood winked,’ yet again with very partial information. :)
The irony is that researchers and experts aren’t much better off than someone who surfs the net. Even back in the 1960s, doctors were overwhelmed by the amount of research and breakthrough discoveries. They could either help their patients, or keep up with research, but not both.
And just a few years ago, as an example, it was realized that the standards and medicines for cardiac care were wildly different around the country, even in neighboring hospitals. They only found out when it was noticed that cardiac patients lived at some hospitals and died at other hospitals.
Just last year, much to everyone’s surprise, it was learned that a lot of emergency room doctors were doing intubation, sticking a tube down someone’s throat so they could breathe, wrong. This was because while they had been told how to do it in medical school, they had never actually *seen* it done, except on the TV show “ER”, where they did it wrong. And did it wrong on the show a lot, like seven times in one season.
For this reason, hospitals are being encouraged to create procedure seminars. (”Uh, no, Ernie, you don’t put the tourniquet around the neck. That would be bad.”)
So the important thing to remember is if you or a loved one have a medical condition, to do your own research. While this doesn’t make you an expert, at least you can talk to a real expert, and they can figure out if there is something there that needs investigation.
It’s a real motivator when you can show the doctor a printout of some research on the subject, and it’s interesting enough for them to find out, one way or another.