Active Low-Carber Forums - View Single Post - The most horrifying story!

I saw the 20/20 piece as well and was very dismayed by it.

Here were people openly admitting that their problems came from poor eating habits - none of them even tried to claim heredity or disease - and yet this clinic that cut them up obviously didn't even consider non-invasive approaches first. Eleven people asked and eleven people got whacked on.

I, too, reached the point of considering this surgery (thank God I found Atkins) and this is some of what I found while researching it:

Quote:

Most patients regain some of their lost weight although few regain it all.

Ten to 20 percent of patients who have weight-loss operations require followup operations to correct complications.

More than one-third of obese patients who have gastric surgery develop gallstones.

Nearly 30 percent of patients who have weight-loss surgery develop nutritional deficiencies such as anemia, osteoporosis, and metabolic bone disease.

The complications of gastric bypass surgery are divided into early, late and minor. The early complications include a risk of death during surgery of between two and six percent, wound infection, kidney failure, nausea and vomiting and wound breakdown. Obese people also have a greater risk of developing blood clots in their legs and lungs during and immediately after surgery.

The late complications include stones in the urine, problems with electrolyte balance, gall bladder problems, liver disease, obstruction of the intestine, peptic ulcer disease, and osteoporosis.

The minor complications are diarrhoea, weakness, low protein levels, vomiting, thirst, low calcium levels, joint pains, hernias, increased uric acid and anaemia.

And people are taking all of these risks because they want to be healthy? Having to take more medications and supplements for the rest of your life because your body can't get enough of them from your diet any longer? Having about one-in-eighteen to one-in-fifty people die on the table! No thank you big time.

Also, many people that have the surgery do so because they think of it as a simple fix that will solve all their problems with no effort required on their part. Yet it is emphasized over and over how this will only be successful if you make permanent changes in your lifestyle including eating right and exercising regularly. Gee, sounds rather familiar, huh?

Are there people that this procedure is absolutely appropriate. I'm sure there are at least a few. Are there people that probably didn't really need the surgery but benefited greatly from it and really did change their behaviors permanently for the good? You bet - a lot of them. But I am equally convinced that this procedure is pushed all too quickly by many unethical doctors and that for most people diets such as LC should at least be tried first - after all, can even the most anti-LC docs really claim that the potential adverse affects of just trying LC are worse than the potential affects of unnessary, major abdominal surgery?

BTW: There are a lot of (probably even most) docs out there that are quite ethical. Many of the sites I visited indicated that they would not even consider a patient a candidate for this surgery unless they had been unsuccessful for at least five years on medically supervised weight loss efforts. But the people that don't want to wait five years (and how many of us could if we have already decided to pursue this drastic a route) can easily find docs that will schedule their surgery for a week from Wednesday.