Here in Ontario, our health care money goes toward the all-important task of supplying queers with vaginae. In the UK, it is spent to staple fat people’s stomachs - something that only rich women in Hollywood used to have done.

Britain’s obesity epidemic has reached such an extent that the number of people having stomach surgery has shot up by 41 per cent in just one year.

New figures show there were 3,459 gastric bypass operations last year for obesity - up from 2,448 the year before.

Each operation costs the NHS around £7,000 - meaning last year the NHS paid more than £24 million for gastric bypass surgery alone.

Gastric bypass operations, which cut of part of the stomach and intestine, are normally only performed on people who are so obese that their life is in imminent danger from heart attack or stroke.

A couple of things: First of all, kudos on doing something for £7,000 to stave off thousands of pounds of care in later years from diabetes, stroke, heart conditions etc.

BUT: I worry that not enough is being done to make sure people don’t gain the weight back. See, a lot of people think the surgery is a miracle cure. It’s not. I have talked to dozens of people who have had it done, only to go back to their old habits and gain all the weight back. This is not a good use of public money. I realize that obesity is a serious issue (my fat ass reminds me of that every day!), but I would rather see the price of green peppers go down before I would want to see so much being spent on a cosmetic surgery that may not solve the long-term problem. Progressives are always on about “root causes”, and this is one area where I agree with them. You cannot change a lifetime of habit in a 3 hour surgery. A person has to be in the right headspace in order to lose weight. Sometimes it takes a health scare. Sometimes it’s a nasty comment from a trusted loved-one. Sometimes it is a positive, like wanting to be more fertile and start a family.

But like going into detox for that last time, you need to have hit your bottom (no fat pun intended) before you can lose the weight. The NHS is spending a lot of money on the symptom, not the disease.

‘These figures have gone up because people are realising that surgical treatment can achieve long-term results if it is done in the right way and with adequate follow-up,’ he said.

The article doesn’t indicate - beyond the post-op care to avoid infection etc - just what kind of follow-up will be provided. We can only hope it will be weekly meetings with nutritionist, shrink, and personal trainer. And we can also hope that the patients actually attend.

Then again, if they are willing to attend those meetings, why not just give them a membership to a good health club for about £1,000, with all three of those people on hand to help them? Hell hath no fury like a good personal trainer. I should know - my ass is 6 inches smaller than it was in November. No surgery required.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 3:14 pm and is filed under Health, United Kingdom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.