The miracle weight loss that isn’t

SELF magazine and MSNBC must have suffered strokes. Rather than elevate blather, they took a more realistic look at the malpractice known as bariatric surgery.

"Seven months after surgery she had developed an agonizing ulcer on the new inner seam between her stomach and intestine, which required a second operation. Not long afterward, Wells recalls eating a bite of tuna steak her husband, Ron, had prepared and doubling over in pain; an ambulance rushed her into surgery yet again, this time for an intestinal hernia — her bowel had snagged on a slit in her abdominal wall. A fourth procedure followed to ease the pain of the abdominal scarring from her previous surgeries. Meanwhile, Wells’s gastrointestinal pain had become so severe that she could barely eat. One day while shoe shopping, she realized she couldn’t flex her right foot. Within weeks her limbs began to tingle, her energy evaporated and her weight plummeted. She stopped menstruating. By late 2006, Wells had shrunk to 105 pounds...

But despite the growing popularity of obesity surgery — and the general perception that it’s a shortcut to thinness and good health — it’s no easy path. The American Society for Metabolic & Bariatric Surgery (ASMBS) in Gainesville, Florida, puts gastric-bypass surgery’s death rate at between 1 in 1,000 and 1 in 200. In one AHRQ study, 4 in 10 patients developed complications within the first six months, including vomiting, diarrhea, infections, hernias and respiratory failure. Up to 40 percent of gastric-bypass patients can suffer nutritional deficiency, potentially resulting in anemia and osteoporosis; seizures and paralysis have been reported in extreme cases. Some of these malnourished patients experience bizarre neurological problems, as Wells did.

Even if patients avoid the major pitfalls, they could be in for a world of intestinal discomfort. Not to mention how difficult it is to retrain yourself to subsist on 3-ounce meals and vitamin pills after surgery. “If you’re here for the quick fix, then this surgery is not for you,” affirms Kelvin Higa, M.D., immediate past president of ASMBS. “This is a serious lifelong commitment.” It’s an adjustment so profound that patients are screened to make sure they’re psychologically up to the task — a test that, according to a recent study in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, one-fifth of would-be patients fail."

You are clearly better off making the commitment to natural weight loss, i.e., burning more Calories than you consume, than this form of medical malpractice.

"All this for a surgery that the experts admit is poorly understood. Few randomized, controlled studies (the gold standard of research) have been performed comparing gastric bypass with nonsurgical weight loss therapy. Although initial weight loss can be dramatic — gastric-bypass patients typically shed around 70 percent of excess weight — patients gradually regain 20 to 25 percent of what they lose. For people with extreme obesity, defined as having a body-mass index of 40 or greater, gastric bypass often merely shifts them into the obese category. Obese patients can drop to overweight status (a BMI of 25 to 29.9). Yet fewer than 10 percent of patients achieve a normal BMI of 18.5 to 24.9, reports Lee Kaplan, M.D., director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Weight Center in Boston. Altogether, weight loss surgery remains an uncertain proposition, and although potential patients must meet certain criteria (as the women interviewed for this article did), experts caution that the surgery is definitely not meant for the mainstream..."

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And don't fall for Big Sick Care's hype.