By Editor,Laura Parnaby
Copyright dailymail
A 600-pound man has been rescued from his Florida home using a crane and a shipping pallet, in shocking footage shared online.
The unnamed man was lifted to safety after suffering a ‘sudden medical crisis’ in West Palm Beach on Tuesday, according to Hype Fresh.
He was unable to pass down the stairway or exit through doors due to his size and undisclosed health complications.
Instead, rescuers used a crane and truck to hoist him from the home and take him to the hospital, as shown on video.
Responders also had to cut part of the apartment wall out, along with some of the balcony railings.
Firefighters carefully secured the patient onto a sturdy pallet padded with pillows before lowering him 20 feet to the ground, where an ambulance was waiting.
Paramedics then took him to a local hospital for urgent care. Obese patients who need specialist movers are known as bariatric in medical terms.
First responders follow guidelines to ensure they are trained in safely moving bariatric people.
Around a dozen people were involved in Tuesday’s rescue mission, which appears to have been a success.
The video posted on Instagram attracted a flood of comments, with many people voicing concern for the man’s safety.
‘Very sad,’ one person wrote, while another exclaimed: ‘They put this man on the pallet?!’
It comes as a major change to new health guidelines could lead to a surge in obesity among Americans.
More than 100 million Americans who qualify as overweight could see themselves tip into the obese category under newly introduced standards.
The traditional measure of overweight and obesity – body mass index (BMI) – may underestimate obesity-related risks in some people, according to the European Association for the Study of Obesity’s (EASO) framework.
The EASO’s guidelines don’t just consider BMI, but also waist-to-hip ratio, as well as all medical, psychological, and functional co-occurring issues.
Relying solely on BMI leaves doctors blind to critical aspects of the ways and places where fat accumulates in the body and how that affects metabolism, and it fails to differentiate between muscle and fat.
A ‘good’ BMI can also mask underlying health conditions. Around a fifth of people within the normal weight category are unknowingly insulin resistant, meaning the body’s cells stop responding to the hormone that regulates blood sugar. It is a dangerous condition that can lead to diabetes.
Researchers from the American College of Physicians studied more than 44,000 adults of varying weight and health levels.
Nearly 19 percent of those previously classified as ‘overweight’ by having a BMI of 25 to 29 were now considered ‘persons with obesity’ (PWO) under the European standard, which considers weight, waist circumference, and metabolic health markers like liver enzymes and insulin levels.
If the same shift were applied to all 110 million overweight Americans, roughly 20.7 million people would be misclassified as overweight when they’re actually obese.