One of the most curious, and potentially worrying trends about the Body Mass Index is just how widespread it is and how commonly and routinely it is used to make judgements concerning an individual’s weight. The reason that the usage of the Body Mass Index in this manner is cause for alarm is due to the fact that the man responsible for creating it, Ancel Keys, originally designed it for population studies for usage for clinical statistics as opposed to individual diagnosis.
It would seem that the Body Mass Index has managed to end up a victim of its own success, this is plainly reflected in the fact that the main reason that it proved to be so popular among the masses was due to the level of simplicity and ease with which it could be comfortably used and relied upon. Even a layman with no concept of medical terminology or principles at all could quickly and easily come to terms with the information netted from the Body Mass Index equation.
It should be noted that whilst the Body Mass Index happens to be very straightforward to use, the results that it provides are not absolutely bulletproof or absolute, and so they will simply give an indication (with a fairly broad margin of error) as to whether the user currently has excess weight or is under weight. Whilst by no means of the imagination, a scientific approach, it certainly gives the primary physician, not to mention the patient themselves, a brief snapshot of the current weight of the patient and what modifications (if any) should be used bmi formula.
However, it would seem that even the experts, i.e. the physicians themselves, have routinely relied upon and made use of the Body Mass Index to make a determination of the weight range of their patients which is not something that should really be done.
Indeed, in the strictest usage of the Body Mass Index, it should only be used to determining the ideal body weight of a person who happens to be utterly physically inactive (such as a person recuperating in hospital, and who is bed-ridden).
Other concerns have been raised about the Body Mass Index in that it suffers from a significant amount of universality around the world, and so there are a number of different variations in existence each of which it should be noted, provide a slightly different and indeed, novel, spin on the Body Mass Index.
Furthermore, the BMI is too simplistic for its own good, and so it provides very limited results in return which quite clearly do not taken into proper consideration, issues such as the muscle frame or overall health of the patient.