Is Surgery the ultimate fix?

 

Surgery, the ultimate fix?

If we watch TV, surgery is the ultimate fix for all ills, including obesity.  The panacea of getting good health.

     It's obvious that things like weight loss surgery aren't really effective.  The drastic procedures like gastric bypass and duodenal switch, which happy to say, most surgeons do not do anymore, will cause weight loss but at a cost which includes malnutrition issues usually found in third world countries and ultimately, shortening the patient's life which may not be what they wanted.  On TV, it's the ultimate fix but as Buddy Valastro says, "It's TV baby!"  Not the truth. Not even near the truth.  Most surgeons are doing the gastric sleeve which is a much safer surgery but also not particularly effective except in the healing stage.  Patients are told they need to diet and exercise which of course, work fine without surgery.

 

hubby mostly just sat in his chair

       But what about other surgeries like open heart surgery...the heart bypass?  

       First of all, informed consent is not given for these surgeries so unless the patient is smart enough to realize they will have to change their lifestyle and exercise a lot, the bypass will not really help them.

       Friend of mine had a triple bypass - she clogged her bypasses and then, found out there was only one surgeon in the country who fixed that.  She is an avid exerciser and eats a healthy diet and still is living.

       But my hubby was more typical.  Never informed by the medical providers he saw every three months, of things like you really have to exercise and change your lifestyle after a heart bypass and that would have fixed his heart without surgery... see REVERSING HEART DISEASE by Dean Ornish, a cardiologist who reversed heart disease in 10,000 patients with his program of a low fat nutritional program and frequent cardio (like 30 minutes, five times a week).... we not only paid thousands of bucks for his frequent medical provider visits but for two of his nine surgeries (a femoral to popliteal bypass and amputation of a couple of toes) our insurance was charged $87,000.  People have done strange things for much less money than that.

        Basically in 2016, he walked into the hospital and never really walked again.  Feeling his diminished ability to walk and live his life as he enjoyed, and with a lifelong dislike of exercise, mostly just sat in his chair.  (and after that kind of surgery one would have to exercise very aggressively!) and a love of high fat food, he was hit by a severe depression which no one could really help.  In 2018 (I was his caregiver for two years), I found what brought some light into his life, was taking him in his mobility scooter to the nearby fast food place every day.  He never really had a bad weight problem from fast food (his favorite) but he genetically had a weakness for vascular disease ... arteries and veins get clogged from fatty foods - another thing we are never warned about. So he ended up with vascular dementia.  He was utterly frustrated and depression.  He hated not being able to move much and sat in his comfy chair most of the day and in one's 70's, even men lose their muscles because they don't have the high amounts of testosterone that they do when younger.  I later found out that doing a coronary bypass on anyone over 65, carries a 4 times greater risk of dementia which in itself, is a horrible condition...worse for the patient than the caregivers.  He was 71 when he had his coronary bypass. Again, we were never warned about the possible repercussions.

He was clinically depressed, going rather suddenly from full function to partial, limited function.  He spent his last 1.5 years in a skilled nursing facility and slept most of the day in bed except getting up for meals, becoming more and more disabled.  He told me once, "If it doesn't work perfectly, it's not worth doing."

     When he died in April 2020, it was and still is a terrible loss for me.  A kindly wonderful husband, I miss him dreadfully and will, from what I've read, will feel this loss for the rest of my life.  We were in our 54th year of marriage.

 I am 75 and healthy - I follow Ornish's program of low fat nutritional program and exercise cardio, six times a week, and resistance training twice or three times a week.  I have not indulged in fast food since 1994.

      The moral of this story is, don't expect your medical providers to tell you how to be healthy.  Read books like Dean Ornish's book (I've read 19 books on health and fitness plus numerous magazine articles) and adapt a healthy lifestyle.  Folks like me only pay the medical business a few hundred bucks a year for two healthy patient visits.