Doctors now recommending children get weight loss surgery

[Jennc714]

Ran across this article today. Breaks my heart. I guess surgery makes the doctors and insurance companies more zeros though, so why push a healthy lifestyle instead?

More severely obese kids should get surgery, doctors say

[amwassil]

Should children with type 2 diabetes get a gastric op?

I saw this article today on the BBC website and it just made me so frustrated and angry. One, the fact that kids are in this position is upsetting, but the fact that this can be dealt with through diet and education is what makes this worse. Performing surgery on kids and medicating them is just treating the symptoms, it’s not dealing with the cause. I just want to shout it from the rooftops that there is another way. How can we make a difference??? The whole thing makes me angry. The dietra…

[ajbennett]

But you shouldn’t do keto because it might be dangerous (despite improving the relevant biomarkers…)

Let’s cut kids open and surgically remove pieces of their stomach instead!

[RightNOW]

I find it rather enraging they sell this to adults. Inflicting it on children is horrific.

And government control of health could lead to people having no choice but to let their kids be gutted for someone’s profit, screwing up their health for life. Horrid.

[lfod14]

It’s scary as hell how many people are stupid enough to think a gov’t run healthcare system is a good idea! At first I was actually agreeing with Oz which is weird enough since I typically can’t stand him, then he goes on about the gov’t subsidizing the wrong foods, (holy crap he’s on a roll!)…THEN it comes out. TAX things that aren’t good! So he doesn’t like the gov’t screwing up food, but then he wants to use the same tactics of forcing (and failing) to make people do whats “healthy” Wonder where Bacon and Bone in Ribeyes would be in that equation? I’m sure it’d be fine… @ $30/lb!

[SlowBurnMary]

Yes, enraging and horrific - and VERY profitable. Postmodernism’s market-based values are normalizing all kinds of pharmacological interventions and surgical solutions to younger and younger people. It’s an unethical, unregulated industry aiming to replicate itself in the east and global south.

The global pharmaceuticals industry is more profitable that oil, gas, and petrochem combined! I learned that a few years back and found it shocking and sobering. Big Pharma is now basically a global drug cartel, totally integrated with the 24/7 global stock market, which has become its raison d’être, and thus is very dehumanized. Dr. Fung touched on this plainly and passionately pertaining to research politics, covered in this other post: Excellent new video talk by Dr. Fung: On balancing insulin/leptin - and on Research Politics!

I also think reknowned trainer Fred Hahn (master teacher of Super Slow method and founder of Slow Burn Resistance Training) has sustainable solutions for childhood obesity in his evidence-based approach which combines low-carb nutrient-density along with age appropriate, joyful strength training! But being that he doesn’t have the marketing army that industry has - his amazing work is still largely sidelined by the mainstreamed, highly profitable corporate medicine approach of drugs & surgeries for children.

http://strongkidshealthykids.com/overview.php

The ongoing public health crisis among children is in need of serious ethics and regulation of industrial interests - and we need community leaders & wise physicians who will stand up for children’s bodily integrity, even at the level of the WHO which is heavily marketed to by the pharmaceuticals industry (note the new diagnoses in the DSM which further legitimize what is, numbers-wise, actually the mass drugging of children from ubiquitous psychotropic prescriptions to now including puberty-blocking and hormonal manipulation). A significant number of mainstream doctors (psychiatrists and the new ‘gender management’ clinicians) are also now recommending various at-risk children (many of them autistic, some of them with histories of abuse, some of them with parents who are mentally ill) who themselves or their parents have been caught by the social contagion of gender/identity crises and peer conformity influences to take a path which leads to life-risking chemical manipulation, numerous plastic surgeries, lifetime prescriptions, and reproductive sterilization along with a host of side effects.

The under 18 group is the NEW MARKET for creating lifelong customers who become totally dependent on the new drugs and surgeries (and their subsequent complications). It’s very predatorial and exploitative in the name of profits and “quick fixes” - but all in the guise of “medicine”.

Children are being put on anti-depressants and other behavioral modification drugs, and now being given weight loss surgery as solutions to what is, at the root, a state of malnourishment, social pathology, and hormonal havoc. To compound this, children are also being prescribed the new so-called ‘puberty blockers’ that interfere with normal physical & brain development, and result in the next step which is opposite-hormone prescriptions by around age 16, with a future of many lucrative plastic surgeries on the horizon for those who are keen to alter their bodies, aka medical transgenderism, previously known as transsexualism.

This interference with normal child development and the increasing withholding of well-proven multi-faceted therapeutics (nutrition, enjoyable physical/martial training, individual therapy, family therapy, peer-group therapy) for at-risk children is heinous, and a form of eugenics as far as I can tell. As well as a human rights violation - considering that the brain is doing critical development until age 21-28, and that human personality development is also affected by physical surgeries and hormonal manipulation, etc. Seems that children are being used to advance the cause of the life-risking new pharma and plastic surgery profitmongering of today’s medical industry - in ever increasing numbers in the UK/US and Australia at the moment. But it’s being sold as “medicine” and “lifesaving”.

At this point, tens of thousands of children have been interfered with in the name of ‘gender management’ starting around age 12 and getting younger by the year. And there’s lot of media that celebrates it, rather than criticizes what is obvious profiteering. Many 16 year old girls have had their breast tissue removed and incinerated and are on high dose Testosterone (which has very serious side effects for females). And boys are aiming to lose their maturing voices by taking Estrogen and saving up for breast implants. With the usual lack of longterm studies on safety for such interventions during the pubertal years.

Informed choice these days is extremely rare (as in, as rare as the duck-billed platypus, or white buffalo), the new corporate medicine being heavily influenced by marketing and selling quotas. The sugar/starch induced malnourishment, psychosis, and nervous distress are being targeted for surgical & chemical “solutions” - and the root cause of children’s distress is actually being ignored. This ends up just compounding the abuses. Historically, when a civilization is in the collapse phase, it devours its children one way or the other. That’s what I see postmodernism doing the last 20+ years.

(Neil Postman PhD, one of America’s foremost education theory & media teachers, predicted much of this when he wrote about the new corporate marketing towards children-as-influencers that really started to boom by the 1980s, and its subsequent destruction of the gains made towards children’s human rights, and the sanctity of childhood. His book “The Disappearance Of Childhood” is one of my most beloved books in human dev - I highly recommend it. In this book he laid out many of the social & market foundations of what we’re now seeing with various lucrative, high tech “solutions” to children’s mental & physical health challenges, and the ignoring of children’s basic needs for development. Professor Postman spent most of his career at New York University in the Education department, and founded their Media Ecology program).

[Kismet]

After weight loss surgery, a person is then forced to eat small meals, six times a day.

Gee! Look at that. Now there will be people who will have to eat “6 small meals a day”.

[Katiekate]

Sorry to chime in here…but, you do understand that tens of millions of kids live in areas known as “food deserts”. No grocery stores. No farmers markets. Just dollar stores And fast food for their family to buy at. Don’t blame the parents for purchasing the ONLY food available to them.

Second, for 30% of the families…this is also the only food they can afford. Mean? Quality cheese? Outside of the possible budget. If you have to feed the family on $40 per week…it is going to be lots of cheap pasta and wonder bread…otherwise some members of the family are not going to eat at all.

Keto is a WOE for the more affluent. People who get to a grocery store where there is actual choice.

[KetoSue]

I read that article as well and thought it was terrible. Do you think it’s partly due to the popularity of the show “My 600lb Life”? Surgery is always serious and should definitely be a last resort, imo.

[Katiekate]

I don’t understand… what would the popularity of a tv show have to do with grocery stores abandoning huge swaths of the population have to do with each other?

Do you think parents don’t give their kinds quality food because they want their kids to end up like that?

I don’t understand

[brownfat]

Keto is a WOE for the more affluent. People who get to a grocery store where there is actual choice.

Surgery shouldn’t be more affordable/accessible than quality food.

[Katiekate]

Medically “necessary” surgery is covered by Medicaid… food is not

Remember…medical necessity is defined by doctors.

[David_Stilley]

Keto is a WOE for the more affluent. People who get to a grocery store where there is actual choice.

Anyone can do KETO who can eat the SAD, it’s about food choices and doing the best you can. Junk food costs a lot of money too.

And I don’t believe anyone is feeding a family with children for $40 a week in America with all the available social aid programs available unless they don’t try to get benefits. Poor children get fed twice a day at most schools and some places even have dinner available. WIC, Food Stamps, and Food Banks all supplement people who need it. It’s far from perfect I admit. The fact is that most people have no interest in thinking about healthy eating or what real food is. If they had a choice carbs win every time. Don’t tell me you can’t get hot dogs, chicken legs, frozen ground beef and frozen broccoli in cities so they have to eat fast food. People under prioritize what they are willing to spend on eating to have material goods.

I live below the national poverty level. I have never had to worry about going hungry. I’ve been on permanent disability for a long time and I could have eaten better before KETO but it was a lesser priority than stuff I wanted. I spend about the same or a bit more now but eat better choices. I feel like food should be where your money should be used wisely but not skimpily for stuff that’s really good for you. I buy clothes in thrift stores mostly, I don’t have an entertainment budget. I live on the cheap. I can skimp on that stuff but not on feeding my body and I am very far from affluent.

[brownfat]

Poor children get fed twice a day at most schools and some places even have dinner available.

Unfortunately they are mostly served foods increasing their odds of benefiting from gastric bypass surgery.

[ajbennett]

Ground beef and eggs works for super cheap and basic keto. You don’t need a Whole Foods in your neighborhood either.

[David_Stilley]

Unfortunately they are mostly served foods increasing their odds of benefiting from gastric bypass surgery.

I totally agree, all the more reason to feed them well at home meals. I know it sucks what they give kids.

[Jennc714]

Under my insurance plan through work the gastric bypass would cost me $20,000+ out of pocket. Who knows how much it would be for one of my kids. It’s not just underprivileged children who are suffering from the SAD. It is very sad that there are places across the globe where healthier food choices are not cheap or easy to come by. However, my point of the post was to point out how quickly doctors are to order up surgeries on children rather than put the effort into educating children and their parents about better ways to eat. Those surgeries will impact the rest of their lives.

[goohsmom]

I live below the national poverty level. I have never had to worry about going hungry. I’ve been on permanent disability for a long time and I could have eaten better before KETO but it was a lesser priority than stuff I wanted. I spend about the same or a bit more now but eat better choices. I feel like food should be where your money should be used wisely but not skimpily for stuff that’s really good for you. I buy clothes in thrift stores mostly, I don’t have an entertainment budget. I live on the cheap. I can skimp on that stuff but not on feeding my body and I am very far from affluent

David, you are an incredible person, and an outlier. I think most of us on this forum are outliers. The average person in our society doesn’t think the same way, they were never taught and they’re not wired to try to learn it. Not making excuses, just stating a fact. I do know that, in the Atlanta area, grocery stores in lower-income areas tend to have less variety and higher prices. In Kentucky, I went to the local “discount” grocery store and was amazed at the prices for the crap. Many places in the rural South have only convenience stores and dollar stores available, to the point that there are protests against Family Dollar and Dollar Tree coming into communities. Food deserts are a reality, as is the loss of generational knowledge on how to make healthy meals on a shoestring. If you get a chance, compare a cookbook or, better yet, a home economics textbook, between the 40’s and today. These are the books in the library, that are supposed to help people learn to cook if there’s no one to teach them. This is what the schools are teaching the kids, if home economics is even taught. It’s hard to break out of that type of pattern of thought.

Okay, rant over, putting the soapbox away

[Momof5]

The public school that all 5 of my kids went to from K-8 had a breakfast program for all the kids in the school that wanted to utilize it -it operated an hour before school time, and two of my children were volunteers for it, and they went early and ate there themselves as well. Many of the teachers kept foods in the classroom for kids that didn’t pack their lunches. There was a special room ran by a school social worker (nicest lady, so sweet) that any of the children could go to for a lunch, not Keto food, but they would get food at least.

Our school had a food bank situation if families needed help (letters came home requesting canned goods or things like pasta, diapers, baby food, etc. for people to bring in). They also provided Christmas Hampers for families in need to help them that included lots of food, a Christmas dinner meal, toys for all children in the family, and gift cards for clothing and grocery stores. I know first hand about it; because for 2 years we were recipients of all this, when my husband was laid off his job for 14 months, and we struggled really badly. Maybe there is just much more help in Canada for families then there is in the States, I don’t know, but there are solutions.

[amwassil]

Oh, Canada…

And introducing our very own air head prime minister… oops. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.