Does It Count If They Kill Me?

Reader Kathleen sent me an article today about a researcher who suggests using a stent graft to limit blood flow to the gut after eating as a way to decrease weight gain.  This made me think about all the alleged “obesity interventions” that have possible side effect of death.  So I have to ask myself – in this whole “let’s eradicate obesity” push, does it count if they kill me?

I know this sounds dramatic but I’m starting to think that the people who are supposed to be responsible for my healthcare want me to be thin so badly that they are happy to risk my life to get it done, and it doesn’t matter what I want.

Weight loss surgeries are  “likely increase the actual mortality risks for these patients by 7-fold in the first year and by 363% to 250% the first four years.” Then there are weight loss drugs kept on the market by powerful lobbying even as they injure and kill the people taking them.

Dear medical establishment:  When people catch on that the diet intervention you’ve been prescribing to everyone almost never works, the next step is not to start amputating, pumping, and change the blood flow to fat people’s stomachs.  What the hell? It’s time to put some actual health in our healthcare, and stop making healthcare about trying to make fat people thin by any means necessary – dead or alive.  Politicians could stop making political speeches about how they are leading the effort to eradicate a whole group of people based on how we look, as if that’s something to be proud of.  How about we make public health about providing health options, information, and access to the public, and stop acting like public health means  making fat people’s health the public’s business? Oh, and it would be nice if messages that purport to be about public health didn’t make me wonder if dead fat people are considered a public health success because it’s one less fatty to eradicate.

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