What Floats?
By
Michael Applebaum, MD, JD, FCLM
We
each have our own obsessions.
One
of mine is a fascination with certain types of behavior.
A favorite is the blind following the blind.
More precisely, the overfat following the overfat.
Robert
Atkins is dead. Rest his soul.
The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine apparently released a
copy of his medical records containing information about Atkins at the time of
his death. Personally, I am not so
sure that the unauthorized release of medical records to the public is
responsible medicine. Especially
when done by physicians or a committee of them.
Still,
the toothpaste is out of the tube. Atkins
apparently died obese. The handlers
of the late man’s business empire have disputed this.
Instead they prefer to argue that he entered the hospital overweight and
died obese due to fluid administration while he was comatose.
Overweight
or obese. It would seem as if the
point is he was not at a proper weight. At
the very least, the diet guru’s diet failed him. Except
of course in the making money hand over fist department.
There it succeeded.
Another
overfat diet guru who is cleaning up is Phil McGraw.
Phil’s a big, fat guy. He
appears jolly, too. For the record,
I would also be jolly if I could make a fortune by selling the instructions to
my failures. It is arguably better
to be lucky than smart, good or excellent.
Phil
did not become a big, fat success on his own, however.
He had help from a big, fat, rich and powerful person who also gives
weight and fitness advice.
In
the diet guru game, it seems to be elephants all the way down.
Which is very appropriate since “guru” is a Hindu word and
“elephants all the way down” is from a Hindu myth of cosmology.
But
this rant is about floating and what floats.
Things
lighter than air float. Helium balloons, for example.
Things lighter than water float. Buoys,
for example.
Then
there are the qualitative things that float.
Things that are so good that they rise above the rest.
Cream, for example. Or the
superlative crème de la crème.
In
medicine, there is another thing that floats.
The technical term is steatorrhea. Steatorrhea
is excessive fat in the feces. Steatorrheic
stool floats. So now we need
another bumper sticker. Not only
does it happen, it also floats.
Steatorrhea
is another qualitative thing that makes it to the top.
Sometimes people reach a peak position without any bona fides. Somehow they got there and others, with qualifications, did
not. In these instances some look
at the situation and explain it away by saying, “Stool floats.”
In many domains, possibly even in the domain of the diet gurus, it may pay to ask yourself, “What is at the top?” or “What floats?” Because it is not always the cream that is floating on top.