Nobody in America got sicker on the morning of 4 June 1998. Twenty-nine million of them went to bed a healthy weight and woke up overweight, because the NIH had moved the BMI line from 27.8 to 25 overnight.
That is the whole business model. Here is the headcount.
1994: a WHO panel invents osteopenia. Bone thinner than a young woman's, nowhere near thin enough to break. Half of all postmenopausal women qualify on the spot.
1998: the overweight threshold drops to 25. Twenty-nine million new patients. Not one of them gained a pound.
2001: the cholesterol panel publishes ATP III. Americans recommended a statin go from 13 million to 36 million. Twenty-three million new customers in one afternoon.
2003: the blood pressure committee invents prehypertension. A diagnosis for people whose blood pressure is normal. Forty-five million qualify on day one.
2013: the statin guideline is rewritten. Another 12.8 million eligible, almost all over sixty, none with heart disease. Eight of the nine men who wrote it were on the payroll of statin manufacturers, disclosed only when they were forced to.
2017: hypertension moves from 140 over 90 to 130 over 80. The share of American adults labelled hypertensive jumps from 32 per cent to 46. Thirty-one million people, before lunch.
2026: the new cholesterol guideline lands in March. Another 21.5 million eligible, total now 87.5 million. The people it just added carry an average ten-year risk of 3.1 per cent. Which is to say, almost none.
Not one of those was a discovery about the human body. Every one was a decision about where to draw a line on a chart, taken in a room, by a show of hands.
And note the direction. Thirty years, four organ systems, and the line has never once moved back. No panel has ever sat down, reviewed the last panel's work, and handed several million people their health back.
Over 140 million reclassifications in a single country. A woman of sixty-eight can sit on four of those lines at once and be four kinds of ill without a single symptom, on five tablets, for a body that is doing exactly what a sixty-eight-year-old body does.
A cure is capped by the number of people who have the disease.
A threshold is capped by the population.
@Mario_Sneh My wife and I paid for aisle seats across from each other, we always do. She has back issues and I have a really bad knee and I’m 6’5”. Right at boarding the gate changed me to a middle seat so a family could sit together. I I was polite but very firm and made them change me back
🚨 BREAKING: This week the American Academy of Pediatrics — the group that shapes the childhood vaccine schedule — told the country it's "neutral."
Their words: "we go by science, not politics."
So I pulled their tax records. Here's who actually pays them 🧵
@AudreyHurtburn Let your child be little as long as you can. Those little mispronounced words will be something you miss for the rest of your life. One day they will say the words perfectly and you will never hear those cute little “mistakes” again…ever.
@jrclark1@libsoftiktok@Carowinds It’s not the elites that keep voting for the same piece of shit politicians year after year…It’s us the American people. We have the power to voted the scum out but never do.