Hospital Scales Found to Be Calibrated to 1998 NIH Committee That Reclassified 29 Million Americans Overnight Because Tuesday Was Slow
Bureau of Weights and Measures confirms 29 million citizens went to bed metabolically normal on June 16, 1998, and woke up with a moral failing at 6:00 AM the next morning.
A forensic audit of hospital exam rooms revealed Thursday that every clinical scale in North America is still hardwired to a single afternoon in June 1998, when a committee moved the “overweight” line from a BMI of 27.8 to 25.0 and broke for sandwiches.
“Nothing in anyone’s body changed that night,” said lead archivist Martha Glenn. “Twenty-nine million people just woke up Wednesday with a new adjective.”
Committee minutes recovered by the audit show the vote took eleven minutes, the lunch order took fourteen, and the only recorded objection was to the turkey.
“The number was chosen because it was round,” Glenn said. “That’s in the minutes. Someone wrote ‘round’ and underlined it.”
The audit found that the scales themselves had not been informed of the change and continued to report weight in pounds, with the moral judgment added later by a person.
At press time the Bureau had recommended that every scale in the country be fitted with a small plaque reading NOT A DIAGNOSIS, and funding was pending.
This dispatch is satire. The events, quotations and organizations in the report above are invented. The Receipt beneath it is not: every figure in it is drawn from published clinical evidence and is cited to its source.
Sensory lab staff reportedly stacking ergonomic chairs against the stairwell door after being asked a question nobody in the building had prepared for.
EAST HANOVER, NJ · By the Editors at The Rogue Patient
