[chmod775]

I feel like I have to play devil's advocate here a bit.

Obesity is an easily treatable condition. One might try to treat them in order: Obesity first, then the asthma. That would justify excluding that particular complication from the study.

[AlchemistCamp]

> Obesity is an easily treatable condition.

Is it? I thought long-term success rates were very low and that prevalence was increasing all over the globe.

[bryan_w]

Also a person who has trouble breathing tends to not do significant exercise because they run out of breath too quickly.

[jallen_dot_dev]

While exercise is healthy, it isn't a great way to lose weight. Eating a healthier diet, in particular lower calorie, is how you lose weight.

[chmod775]

prevalence != difficulty of treatment

people's unwillingness to cooperate != difficulty of treatment

Asthma also isn't the only condition that is hard to treat in morbidly obese people. For many conditions it will be too late to start paying attention to one's calorie intake, but asthma is one that is survivable in the meantime. Severe discomfort and possible death tends to be a good motivator.

[throwthere]

Researchers generally analyze intervention success by intention to treat.

If a treatment is telling people to "start paying attention to one's calorie intake," and that doesn't have the desired effect, whatever the reason, I think it's fair to say that intervention isn't useful.

[chmod775]

Success rate also isn't the same as difficulty.

It's very easy to fill out a lottery ticket, but success rate is very low.

Success is a boolean condition that often first needs to be defined, while difficulty is a spectrum and a more rigid concept. Really the only complication is subjective vs. objective difficulty (what is objectively difficult may be subjectively easy to someone practiced).

Difficult things require hard skills. Reducing someone's calorie doesn't require any hard skill that I am aware of.

[throwthere]

> Success rate also isn't the same as difficulty.

> It's very easy to fill out a lottery ticket, but success rate is very low.

> Difficult things require hard skills. Reducing someone's calorie doesn't require any hard skill that I am aware of.

I don't really want to engage with those statements other than to say I think morbidly obese people do have quite a hard time losing weight.

[chmod775]

> hard time

With which you mean the process causes discomfort? Probably less so than being asthmatic and/or a host of other things, but yes.

Other than that there can be some psychological issues that make self-controlled treatment subjectively hard or impossible. But then we'd have found another condition that would need to be treated first, getting us back to where we started: Somebody running a study on the efficacy of a diet probably would want to preclude people psychologically unable to stick to it...