Bariatric surgery

Posted: 10/10/2006 - Commentary by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger

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This is one of those cartoons that attempts to demonstrate the silliness of bariatric surgery -- the surgical removal of part of the digestive tract in order to "treat" obesity. You have to look (a little) for the punch line in this cartoon, which is of course all about the lamps.

It does raise an interesting question: Didn't you ever wonder what hospitals do with all those body parts they remove from patients during surgical procedures? There must be a huge supply of gallbladders, appendixes, cancer tumors and stomach parts available on a daily basis, and knowing how medicine works, there's little doubt that somebody figured out a way to make money from all these body parts. Why not make them into hand-crafted lamps?

Yes, it sounds silly. But since when was modern medicine anything but silly? Bariatric surgery is marketed with the insane idea that human beings can be made healthier by removing sections of their vital organs. As the thinking goes, we were all born with too many organs, if you can believe that, and the only way to restore health is to start removing them.

They start with the stomach, and due to blood sugar complications that often arise after bariatric surgery, they may continue on to remove part of the pancreas as well. This surgical assault usually continues on some level until the patient is either broke (or dead) or their insurance runs out, at which point all the surgical procedures mysteriously stop.

Read The madness of bariatric surgery and other "modern" surgical procedures to learn more about the crazy ideas of surgeons who would rather maim patients than actually help them heal.

I'm not saying that all surgery is bad: Clearly we need surgeons to repair people after trauma and accidents, and U.S. surgeons are, I believe, the best technicians in the world, and they save countless lives following car accidents, drive-by shootings, farm machinery injuries and the like. But using surgery to treat eating disorders...? That's about as crazy as using food to treat a gunshot wound.