AAAAHHHH! More Bad "Science" and Americans are shown to be inferior AGAIN!

Study: Canadians Healthier than Americans

ATLANTA (AP) - You can add Canadians to the list of foreigners who are healthier than Americans. Americans are 42 percent more likely than Canadians to have diabetes, 32 percent more likely to have high blood pressure, and 12 percent more likely to have arthritis, Harvard Medical School researchers found. That is according to a survey in which American and Canadian adults were asked over the telephone about their health.

A TELEPHONE SURVEY?????

The study, released Tuesday, is being published in the American Journal of Public Health. It is based on a telephone survey of about 3,500 Canadians and 5,200 U.S. residents in 2002-03. Those surveyed were 18 or older.

The new study found that 6.7 percent of Americans and 4.7 percent of Canadians reported having diabetes; 18.3 percent and 13.9 percent, respectively, reported having high blood pressure; and 17.9 percent and 16.0 percent said they had arthritis. The Americans also reported more heart disease and major depression, but those difference were too small to be statistically significant.

About 21 percent of Americans said they were obese, compared with 15 percent of Canadians. And about 13.5 percent of the Americans admitted to a sedentary lifestyle, versus 6.5 percent of Canadians. However, more Canadians were smokers - 19 percent, compared with about 17 percent of Americans.

About 42 percent of the Americans rated their quality of health care as excellent, while 39 percent of Canadians did.

Also, 92 percent of American women said they had a Pap test within the last five years, while 83 percent of Canadian women had. But Canadians have lower death rates from cervical cancer. ``It's a little hard to interpret,'' Woolhandler said.

One more plus for the Americans: Fewer than 1 percent said they were unable to get needed care because of long waits, compared with 3.5 percent of Canadians.

However, about 80 percent of Americans had a regular doctor, while 85 percent of Canadians did. And nearly twice as many Americans said there were medicines they needed but couldn't afford (9.9 percent versus 5.1 percent).

So now people's perceptions are being reported as an objective measure of their actual health and their health care systems. Do they think they "need" medications because their doctors told them, or because they saw an ad on TV and thought "Hey, I could sure use that stuff"? The study doesn't say. I didn't see anything about how the participants were selected either, except that they were all "18 or older" (how do you confirm that over the phone?) Well, how much older? Were the Canadian and American populations compared age group to age group? It doesn't seem so, though even an AP reporter should know that it would make a huge difference if most of the Canadians interviewed were under 35 and most of the Americans over 50. I also don't see any error bars on the accompanying histogram. There's no possibility of error in these numbers? Nobody ever lies or exaggerates about their health to a phone surveyor? I'm not sure what this is, but it isn't science and really shouldn't be dignified with the title "study".