Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.
I have been thinking about writing more social media facing content for some time and am now in a place to hopefully make this a regular feature. One of the things holding me back has been whether I would have enough content to contribute something meaningful, and that I would be able to write something regularly enough to be reliable, to those looking to read it.
With that in mind, my goal is to post a minimum of once every two weeks (lets all check back in a year and see how well I have done).
My kaupapa for doing this is to provide education, insight and commentary on bariatric surgery in particular, the weight loss industry more generally, and on life improvement as a whole. I plan to do this in a way that is designed to inform people on how to make decisions for themselves: to allow people rangatiratanga over their own tinana.
I am a scientist, a skeptic, and a human. While I will always write posts with the intention of being honest and truthful, I also reserve the right to change my opinion when and if more information comes to my attention on a particular topic.
There are a lot of bold claims made in the weight loss industry. A lot of it is not backed by robust science. Between the broad generalisations and the over reliance on first principles, there is a some knowledge. I want to always make it clear what is backed by research, and what is more of an educated guess.
Each post will come with two metrics:
The Extemporanometer: how fast did I write the article? If I bash out a post from my phone while driving in traffic, there are more likely to be errors than a carefully composed and edited piece.
Level of Evidence: this is a gauge of the science. Level 1, systematic reviews are the best. Level 6, expert opinion is the lowest level of evidence. (I will write a post at some point though, about the difference between evidence based medicine and science based medicine, and about how the lack of evidence produces the strongest opinions).
That's enough for starters, I think. A bit of a dry beginning but that's how most bariatric journeys begin.