Longer needles necessary to give intramuscular injections.

A study recently presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America indicates that we are getting so fat that medical workers will need to start using longer needles to give intramuscular injections. The researchers did injections into the usual site for injections into muscles, injecting a small, harmless amount of air, and looked at the area with a CT scan. Only 32% of the injections reached the muscle, where a rich network of blood vessels assures delivery of the medication into the circulation. The remainder of the injections were into the fat overlying the buttock muscles, where absorption is unreliable. "There is no question that obesity is the underlying cause," Dr. Chan said. "We have identified a new problem related, in part, to the increasing amount of fat in patients' buttocks."

Add another entry to the list of reasons that obesity is harmful to health!

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