• gaja@lemm.ee
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    2 days ago

    Got a lot to say but I’ll keep it brief-ish. Corporations love unhealthy people. They will artificially celebrate this and reinforce unhealthy lifestyles. This extends beyond weight.

    Once entrapped, escape is hard. Some are passive and depressed. Some are dismissive and defensive. No matter which cycle you are in, it’s unhealthy.

    I think smoking is bad like I think being overweight is bad. If a doctor says alcohol is killing you, it probably is. I don’t think hatred is deserved, but don’t expect any validation for those choices.

    • defunct_punk@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Surely no coincidence that being obese is a gateway to hyperconsumerism anyway. Sugary, fatty, processed snack foods are way more profitable than healthy meals.

      Walking around town is free, can’t have that. Sit at this computer chair, watch advertisements and play video games instead.

      Heart disease at 26? That’ll be $2k/month until you die.

      Get depressed, buy the meds, never leave your couch, don’t fight back, you’re the evolution of humanity and - most of all - you are beautiful.

    • toadjones79@lemm.ee
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      2 days ago

      I am down 50+ pounds, and have another 20 to go. This is new to me, but I absolutely agree with everything you said.

    • irelephant [he/him]🍭@lemm.eeOP
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      2 days ago

      The meme isn’t about that, I’ve read stories of some doctors refusing to perform surguries to overweight people, but other doctors doing the surgery anyway.

      The same way a lot of women get told stuff is just from their period by doctors.

      • ZeffSyde@lemmy.world
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        14 hours ago

        My mother had a doctor that refused to move forward with knee surgery because she was so depressed and refused to do therapy because it hurt her knee so much to move around.

        I guess I understand, why go through the trouble of surgery if she’s just going to be a bummer couch potato afterwards and never change her ways?

        But at least she’d be a bummer couch potato whose knee didn’t threaten to give out on her whenever she tried to do laundry in the basement.

        If I take my car in for new brake pads, don’t refuse me service because the transmission is on its way out.

      • medgremlin@midwest.social
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        2 days ago

        I’m a medical student and I have some direct experience with this. Sometimes, the difference between the surgeon who will do the procedure versus the surgeon that won’t do the procedure is the availability of specialized facilities and equipment that they have access to. An elective surgery (i.e. not an emergency surgery) can go from routine to very high risk depending on the amount of adipose tissue the patient has.

        And it’s not just a matter of the fat tissue overlying the surgical site. Morbidly obese patients are much more likely to have things like sleep apnea which can make anesthesia more risky and might require more specialized equipment than a particular surgeon/hospital/anesthesiologist might have access to. The “morbid” part of “morbid obesity” also refers to the fact that people above a certain threshold of weight are much more likely to have other health conditions like heart disease that make anesthesia more risky.

        • uselessRN@lemm.ee
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          1 day ago

          This is what I came to say but wasn’t smart enough to put into words. There’s a lot more factors than just being overweight of why a surgery can’t be performed. For a while an issue at my hospital was we were one of the few in the area that could do MRIs on larger patients. So bigger hospitals would transfer these patients to us just for an MRI because their MRI machine was too small or couldn’t handle the weight.

          • medgremlin@midwest.social
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            1 day ago

            There’s a reason you have to get a pre-op physical exam for any non-emergent surgery. Figuring out if you’ll wake up from the anesthesia at all is part of the calculus that determines whether the benefits of the procedure outweigh the risks.

          • medgremlin@midwest.social
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            1 day ago

            Sometimes. It depends why the first surgeon would be unable to do the procedure. If the problem is that the patient might not wake up from anesthesia because of problems with heart disease, lung problems, or other metabolic issues, then it doesn’t really matter what the surgeon has to say about actually doing the procedure because the anesthesiologist is the one saying “no”. If it’s an issue of too much adipose, sometimes it would mean that the surgery would take longer than it’s safe for the patient to be under anesthesia.

            Another possibility is that the first surgeon operates at a facility that doesn’t have access to more advanced technologies or other medical specialists in the event that something goes wrong. And there are some surgeons that are just more willing to accept the risk of a bad outcome, and I would argue that that’s rarely in the patient’s best interest. There are alternative options that the surgeon should discuss with the patient as part of the informed consent process, and sometimes, the alternatives to surgery are just safer than the risk of the surgery itself, even if they aren’t as effective or are a long term treatment (ongoing) as opposed to a definitive treatment (cure). If the patient has a high risk of serious complications, up to and including death, then attempting the curative procedure might be more risk than it’s worth compared to a long term medication that mitigates the disease.

            You’ll see this with pregnant patients too. For elective procedures that have safer alternatives or temporizing measures (a holdover treatment until surgery is safe), those are generally preferred to putting a pregnant patient under anesthesia because of all the cardiovascular, immunologic, and other physiologic changes that happen during pregnancy alongside potential risks to the fetus.

      • The reason for that is that surgeons are rated based on their success percentages meaning they’ll recommend against risky surgeries.

        The upside of this is that surgeons aren’t operating willy-nilly on people and will make a proper risk assessment. The downside is that overweight people have an inherently higher risk of complications from surgery, so some surgeons will pass.

        It’s not because they think these people don’t need it, it’s because they think it’s too risky. They’re usually not wrong about that, you just need to find a surgeon willing to take the risk or, if possible, reduce the risk by losing weight.

        • Fogle@lemmy.ca
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          2 days ago

          There’s also no point to surgeries if the people aren’t committed and are just going to eat even more and put the weight back on. It’s like consolidating debt to make one payment easier but keeping all the credit cards and building up the debt again. It just makes you worse off

          • albert180@piefed.social
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            2 days ago

            That’s why where I am from you usually need a clearance from a psychiatrist that there are no psychological issues in eating habits that would render that surgery useless, before the surgeon is allowed to do it

      • gaja@lemm.ee
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        2 days ago

        Look. Shitty doctors exist, but when 1/3 of the US is overweight, there are underlying issues that need addressing. I only hear horror stories when an addict, alcoholic, or overweight individual in my life is feeling insecure or defensive about a prognosis. Too many people deflect and it’s enabling a much larger issues. Our basic instincts are being exploited.

        • geekgrrl0@lemmy.ca
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          1 day ago

          I have some horror stories about being a normal weight woman seeking medical care. What’s that about then?

            • geekgrrl0@lemmy.ca
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              1 day ago

              I don’t know, the medical community ignoring fat people’s health concerns (beyond obesity) and ignoring women’s health concerns, seem to be the same issue and I posit they are the same cause too (hubris, arrogance, and just simply not living up to their oath)

        • msprout@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          America’s obesity epidemic is a function of our car culture. This is the only country on God’s green Earth that feels putting in sidewalks is a moral failure.

          • prettybunnys@sh.itjust.works
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            2 days ago

            Obesity is a food issue, our reliance on cars and increasingly sedentary lifestyle may exacerbate the issue but it’s not the cause

            • Nalivai@lemmy.world
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              2 days ago

              You can’t really know it. I suspect it’s a combination of the two. If you drive everywhere and sit around the rest of the time, you can’t be healthy no matter your diet.

              • prettybunnys@sh.itjust.works
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                1 day ago

                Obesity is a product of excess caloric intake NOT sedentary lifestyle.

                Lack of cardiovascular and kinesthetic health is a product of a sedentary lifestyle.

                • Nalivai@lemmy.world
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                  1 day ago

                  It is once again, incredibly simplistic view of a very complicated issue, so simplistic it stops being accurate.

                  • prettybunnys@sh.itjust.works
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                    1 day ago

                    Unless you’ve magically discovered the source of energy and mass from nothing, and revolutionized our understanding of the natural world … no, it isn’t.

              • blarghly@lemmy.world
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                1 day ago

                It’s obvious that this is not the most important underlying cause, as other countries which are less auto oriented are also quite fat.

      • HollowNaught@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        When talking about obese individuals, the fat very easily gets in the way of surgery. Compared to a healthy patient the risk of complications during surgery is much greater and really not worth chancing it (most if the time)

      • Cypher@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        I’m guessing that’s under the US health system, where doctors are incentivised to only perform surgeries with a low risk of complications

        • medgremlin@midwest.social
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          For a lot of doctors, the incentive to not do risky procedures is the fact that you have to live with the guilt of your patient’s death, even if you did everything perfectly. Or, you do everything perfectly, but they still have a poor outcome because they weren’t healthy enough to go through the procedure and the recovery, and you get sued for millions of dollars because you didn’t spend 4 hours going through the informed consent with the patient to ensure that every single possible complication was adequately discussed.

          I’ve worked in emergency medicine and I’ve had patients die in my care that we had absolutely no way of saving. The screams of their families still haunt me and I will carry those cries of anguish and loss to my grave. I would not perform a procedure that was not 1000000% necessary if the risks are too high because I have enough blood on my hands already, and I haven’t even finished medical school.

        • Lv_InSaNe_vL@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          What countries medical system encourages risky surgeries? As far as I’m aware “reducing risk” is most of the game in medicine

    • dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      I’m just sitting here waiting for the point of what you said. 60 people upvoted, but you didn’t say anything.

      The phrase of the day (which you should Google of you downvote this) is pseudo-profound bullshit.

      • gaja@lemm.ee
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        2 days ago

        You count just say you disagree and explain why it upset you.

    • Estradiol Enjoyer @lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      2 days ago

      You are ignorant of the genetic factors at play here and I think you need to realize that your rhetoric is identical to victim blaming eugenics ideology. You sound like RFK Jr. and I’m guessing you would want me dead if you could have things that way. It’s honestly despicable and I don’t know how people like you sleep at night.

      • CancerMancer@sh.itjust.works
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        1 day ago

        Used to see the odd “genetics” fat person and they’d just be built a bit bigger. Now I’m seeing fucking waddling planetoids and that’s not genetics man. Part of that blame belongs to individuals but part of it belongs to the food lobbyists and their quest to add sugar and corn syrup to everything.

        Incentivise people to grow their own vegetables (or source them locally from those who already are) and disincentivise the purchase of processed and sweetened food. Have our agencies promote healthy recipes using weight rather than volume measurements and show people how to use scales to properly weigh ingredients and help make it as easy as possible to count calories.

      • kcweller@feddit.nl
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        2 days ago

        Buddy, you’re over stating the importance of genetics. Time and time again it shows that getting bigger is more nurture than nature. Papers and research retounely come out saying its a two-sides of the same coin issue, but then fail to support their nature/genetics claims, which are often refuted. Slender families get children who end up obese because of lifestyle, and their children become obese. That’s not genetics. The grandchildren end up obese because obese parents place their lifestyle and diets onto their children.

        Claiming something is victim blaming is insanely disrespectful to the people who actually get blamed for things out of their control. Your weight is in your control for the vast, VAST majority of people.

        People with disabilities who can’t get an opportunity to do something about it? Sure. Can that disability come from genetics, sure. But that’s a small minority of people who are overweight.

      • gaja@lemm.ee
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        2 days ago

        Hear me out. You’re villainizing me because what I said struck a nerve. You don’t actually believe I want you dead. You’re just upset that I pointed out a deep flaw. Maybe it’s an insecurity, or cognitive dissonance, or whatever. I’m very familiar with this type of response. Whatever it is, realize that someone likely depends on you and that an unhealthy lifestyle is not good for them. I’m encouraging you to do better, if not for yourself, the people in your life you care for. I recognize my ignorance. I’m not a therapist. I’m just stating something I’ve personally observed.